[monero-xmr]

The government is political. When you make things political, it has requirements separated from the profit motive.

I’m not an anarchist. I think the government has its place. But it’s undeniable that a lot of fundamental research is held hostage by politics: Certain ideas are in vogue and get funded, while the new ideas and those pursuing them must wait, or perhaps never get funded for whatever political reason.

The profit motive enables risk takers to get funded with high risk, high reward ideas. If there was no way to capture that profit, we would be subject to political whims for the most important innovations for society.

[zjuventus14]

I don’t entirely disagree - subsidies aren’t a perfect solution. But the current system is so far from perfect that I think considering alternatives is worthwhile.

I’d be curious how many actual world-changing innovations were ONLY pursued because of the existence of copyright, that don’t belong to a class of innovation (like pharmaceuticals) that could have a solution, whether copyright, subsidies, or something else applied to the industry as a whole. I don’t doubt that there are some, but I would be shocked if their benefit isn’t dwarfed by the innovation lost to the anticompetitive nature of patents and copyright.

[monero-xmr]

It doesn't have to be all-or-nothing. If research is a tree, and the seeds and trunk are funded by the government, then the branches and leaves are the private sector. The government's strength is providing large and longterm funding for ideas with uncertain outcome. The government's weakness is managing and running an enterprise of any scale - see the DMV, any public housing in America of appreciable size, the VA, the vast majority of public schools, and so on. This is because no one in the enterprise has any motivation at all, other than not getting fired, which is practically impossible in the government sector.

I'm fine with initial research being funded by the government, and entrepreneurs attempting to take that research to commercialize it.