Do you actually believe research wasn't done or even funded through universities prior to the ballooning money laundering operations of federal agencies. There are two significant drawbacks to having the federal government wash the moneys through their coffers first.

1) Government must tax, collect and will then control the capital. It will manage and decide who the winners and losers are in the grant sweepstakes of research. This allows friends of political departments with agendas to get money and others who may have legitimate experiments or research that might produce opposing views to starve for lack of funds. When the government takes the money FIRST and exercises the spending priorities, it severely inhibits true research in many many ways. The lying political thesis under all this is that the government is benign and makes no agenda or has no interest in anything but pure research. Baloney! If you believe that then I have some beach front property in Kansas riding atop an oil field and gold reserve to show you.

2) When the free market looks at projects and determines it will fund research, it makes certain that the ideas or theories to be explored offer a significant chance for a marketable return. Why do you nthink the Oil Companies have paid far less attention to other energy sources. FOOLS think it is because they wouldn't be interested. That doesn't wash in a free market. The reality is that COAL fired plants even with moder scrubbers and nearly 100% C removal from atmospheric emissions costs around $0.05/Kwh. Natural Gas runs about the same. Once the true cost of plants, equipment, manufacturing and installation are factored in between government subsidies for capitalization and development of:

Wind
Thermal Sodium Laser
Thermal Water
Geo-thermal Steam (HP)
Geo-thermal Steam (LPF)
PV and Commercial PV

the cost deltas are roughly all the same. It costs between $19-31 and change per Kwh for so called green energy. The ONLY thing green about it is that it takes an unbelievable amount of money to develop those plants for generation. Furthermore, the maintenance is high and the lifespan for such plants is somewhat limited. I am not saying they don't have their purpose or we should not develop them. But it is foolish to think America can produce enough energy from those sources without Coal, Gas and Nuclear carrying the lion's share of nthe load for a very long time. ANY TIME a government has to subsidize something so heavily, it is clear the private sector has walked away from it because it is NOT YET COMMERCIALLY VIABLE.

What MARXISTS and Keynesian Socialists ALWAYS fail to take into account is that a FREE MARKET which they never trust, is actually quite adept at finding product holes and filling them. My wife and I were driving in between county and city parcels in SW Las Vegas (Clark County, Nevada) and you can tell which areas are city and which are county by the quality of the street improvements. People erroneously think the CITY built the roads, sidewalks, placed the street-lamps and traffic signals on corners, built the parks etc. Government has done almost NONE of that. Simply having strong zoning and planning law in place forced the private developers to do all that work while putting in subdivisions and strip malls, etc. Private Sector developers ALSO encouraged those expensive requirements be placed upon them BY LAW so that everyone building in cities would be on equal footing. The marketing value of improvements was the underlying foundation for the need and the emphasis on development quality.

This idea that the private sector is shoddy and will rip people off is foisted on us by governments that employ the very least productive people in society. About 15 years ago, I was busy construction both the Bellagio ($1.5 B resort) and the Fitness Center at Nellis AFB ($1.5 million). Now the USACE had five different $140k/yr inspectors crawling all over that project. One had the gall and audacity to tell me that the government was justified in spending $500K on personnel to ensure the taxpayers that the quality wouldn't fall off. I looked at the young inspector and said, "OK, so you actually believe that:

1) the US Government is more concerned about quality when spending money it never earned as it simply took what it wanted from the citizenry by legislative fiat and for which no real meaningful accounting will ever be done, than

2) Steve Wynn who borrowed $1.5 billion from very demanding Asian businessman who will gladly whisk you off to their little Island in the South China Sea to extract payment if you default on their capital?

It was as if a light went on. He said, "Wow I never really thought of it that way." He had no clue. He actually thought that the government were more concerned about quality than the people who put their own hard earned or borrowed capital on the line. He's an idiot. My father used to say, close enough for government work, which in his vernacular as a rocket scientist meant, good enough to get by.

I want you to know, I believe great and valuable research IS DONE at universities. But more money would be available for better and more important work if the laundryman was private business for most of that capital rather than politically motivated department heads tied often to political agendas which the university has little or no control over. Governments claiming that corporations are evil and will rape and pillage the nation if left unchecked are again, complete idiots. Corporations must compete one with another and retain a happy client le. Failure of any large scale nature (the Pinto, Dow Corning in India, BP in the gulf anything like that) will kill a company or severely hamper it's image in ways is certainly never wants. Mistakes happen when government does things and often with as much or even greater catastrophe.

I for one would love to see the 1960's model returned. Back then the government offered simple tax deductions for research operations and companies did research. Every meaningful invention today has come from private invention, not government largess. Edison, the Wright Brothers, Television, Dolby Sound, and we can go on and on in industry after industry, 90% of the most important inventions and life/business improvement items came from the minds of private people. Most of the time, government involvement has been an attempt to get in on the ground floor and insure a tax stake, but never forget the political side I mentioned.

As I said once before, Government does get in at the beginning but usually only after it has seen that it can coalesce more power through involvement. Queen Isabella did not hand three ships and a compass to Columbus because she had a kind heart. She wanted whatever he found to fill her treasury. Nothing really has changed in that regard since 1492.