When people start talking about ideal and better-than-idea worlds and voluntary payments or government disbursements, my mind goes to communism. While communism sounds like it provides a better outcome on paper, capitalism (with constraints) has shown it's a much better system for raising the living standard of everyone, even if there is quite a disparity between the lowest and the highest.

Would some ideal-world type situation for patents work? I doubt it. We have patents, and there are some upsides to that system, even if it has been abused recently. I think people have transferred a lot of their anger at the abuses to the concept of patents themselves. Here we have someone that patented something, and people are upset that he did that before knowing how he intends to use the patent. The patent could be free for non-commercial use. It could be free for many things. Or it could be that it's most likely to be used in hardware by a large corporation that prints chips and not individuals, and he'll license it to them and the most anyone will see of it is a few cents added to the production cost of each chip (not that anyone even knows what that is, since retail chip pricing is so crazy).

How we measure a system shouldn't be based on just the biggest successes and biggest problems (but those should be looked at), but on the long track record of what it does and how it performs. In that light, I think capitalism has shown itself a better system in the long run, and I think patents have shown their merit in the long run as well.