Are you seriously saying that government wont consider Hyperloop because they are averse to innovation? On the contrary, "big government" has been the largest engine of innovation the past century. NASA has put people into orbit, and on to the Moon, has launched the first space stations, and made several robotic probes to other planets and the depths of space. Musk founded SpaceX which has managed to do a fraction of the things NASA has decades after them. In 1972, the Rand corporation, financed by the United States, thoroughly researched a "Very High Speed Transit System" that is similar to Musk's proposal. Sure there will be political difficulties implementing something like The Very High Speed Transit System or Hyperloop, but realistically the government is the only entity that has the foresight, money, and motivation to undertake such a project.
NASA total budget over its lifetime: $790.0 B in 2007 dollars. Just the book cost of the wars since 2001, http://costofwar.com/ 1.45 T not including future costs (debt payments, health care, net drag on economy) are roughly 2 more entire lifetime-NASAs. Wow. How much innovation have those two wars earned us?
How about large scale funding of science and technology is an "engine of innovation", whatever that term means.
That's what I'm advocating, that the government spend more money on science and technology. The government is able to take risks in investing in unproven technologies and sciences where industry can't, because they aren't concerned with profit. I'm not an apologist for the wars.
Problem is, we don't have more money to spend on anything. The US government is spending twice revenue - not a position where you hemorrhage cash & credit with no concern for profit. (And no, it's not going to "stimulate the economy" back up to break-even.)
On top of that, the government used to take such risks in unproven technologies, underlined by tolerating the non-trivial odds of spectacular lethal failure...but that was decades ago. Now it can't even make a bus door without plastering eighteen warning signs around it [1].
Exploratory spending is great when you have money to spare. We don't. Now we have to rely on Elon Musk et al to pursue outlier projects - and they only reason they can is because of the big literal payoff if it works.
