You misunderstood my argument slightly, it's not that it's "easier" for rich people, it's that it's literally impossible to risk money you don't have, and as a result of that you have exploitation of labor; stealing the surplus value of labor from a class that has no option other than to participate in wage labor.
Also the idea that there's no risk in labor but there is risk in being a capitalist is a liberal lens that fails to actually account for material reality. What's the absolute worst case for both the capitalist and laborer? That they lose all access to their money, and have to rent themselves out to a capitalist.
Put another way, the risk capitalists engage in is being demoted from the owner class to the working class. That risk doesn't justify them taking the surplus value of labor to accumulate vast hoards of wealth.
Left liberals view this as a quantitative issue, but it's a qualitative one. Profit is definitionally surplus value of labor, so no matter how small you make the capitalist's profit, it's always theft.
We need to incentivize risking capital
Absolutely, without capital injection the economy couldn't function. Capitalism by definition requires exploitation of labor, and theft of the surplus value of labor is what incentivizes capitalists to not hoard all their wealth.
It's a fundamentally broken system. Private entities shouldn't be the ones handling investment, nor handling direction of development. Those should be handled democratically by worker syndicates, the capital should be injected from the state/communities.
Essentially anytime private corporations are involved in an industry (housing, healthcare, capital injection, governance, etc.) it breaks the system. Liberals are slowly seeing these material realities unfold, and so the propaganda being fed to them is harder to buy. You don't find many people in support of private healthcare or governance anymore, and some are starting to learn about the others too.
The comparison to the industrial revolution ignores a qualitative difference between this and that; we're in an age where automation can fully automate away jobs. When the industrial revolution happened, it absolutely did deteriorate working and living conditions for essentially everyone, however humans were still needed. It should be noted that having a system where less work leads to worse outcomes is a fundamentally toxic and broken economic system, but that's what capitalism is.
This next thought makes a lot of people uncomfortable, but we might actually not have special sauce in our organic sacks. It's possible that human-level intelligence/expertise is achievable from AI (even if it's not LLMs that get there), and it's also possible that robotics becomes as versatile as humans at movement.
Yes, AI and robots are expensive, but you want to know what else is insanely expensive? Humans. I cost my employer $150,000 a year. If they could subscribe to a future GPT6 that out performed me and my coworkers for $1000 a month that would save them a metric fuckload of money. Same thing with buying a super versatile robot, sure it might be like $100,000 for a single robot, but if it lasts 10 years it's $10,000 a year and can work far longer hours and much more consistently than a human.
What we're talking about with any non-dysfunctional economic system is utopia, a world where nobody needs to work and everything is maintained, developed, and expanded without human intervention. Under capitalism this utopia becomes a dystopia, it leads to mass starvation, lack of resource distribution, and death.