Would you prefer America to be more collectivist?

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In the right ways such as rebuilding social capital and third places? Maybe.

More collective care for making sure talent gets to where it needs to go more efficiently for standards of living? Maybe.

Economic collectivism? No.

The trick is having enough competition to where people can see what works and what doesn't, just not so much competition that you need to become a mercenary, brigand, or one of Roger Waters' 'dogs' to survive. Too little competition you regress, too much and you eat your seed corn and collapse (like we're doing right now).

No. I prefer America to be free like it is now.

I wrote earlier:

In some specific markets we need MORE individual freedom, e.g. in the housing market in major cities like NYC, by loosening up zoning laws to get rid of single-family-only zoning.

In other sectors, e.g. utilities, more government involvement would likely be an improvement in many places.

I am with you...I would prefer America to be the country with the most freedom.

I feel like at some point freedoms start to conflict, so a society can't just turn all the knobs to 10 and pretend like they've made themselves the most free society to exist. Instead those conflicts need to be properly managed.

Like for example, environmental regulations might infringe on a factory owner's "freedom" to dump untreated waste into the river, but everyone downstream has their rights infringed upon by the factory owner choosing to externalize his pollution costs by dumping it into the river in the first place.

Society seems to be obliged to regulate where our rights and freedoms inevitably come into conflict.

I've heard that renting is a problem for young people in big cities in the United States. Collectivism has a lot of experience dealing with this problem.

Suppose you divide control of a country among competing gangs. The advantage of this is that no one gang will ever gain total control. Smart people can easily game a system like that, and potentially achieve a great deal by way of societal advancement.