[chii]

> funding much of the basic research

it's unfortunate that these funding don't actually bring in profits with which to maintain and continue future funding. It's why i somewhat dislike the publicly funded research model, because the commercialization of basic research is what leads to profit in the future, and this part is poorly done by gov'ts (or very well done by private parties looking to profit off public research).

I say that to change the system, these basic research should have IP associated with it, by which if companies use it, they pay a royalty after they achieve profit of $X (where X can be decided based on the research itself). It's obvious that taxes aren't sufficient.

[kmos17]

Not everything needs to be profit generating, government funded research is how we get breakthroughs with very wide ranging benefits, especially when we are talking about advances in medicine. Profit making will often have the opposite effect by incentivizing the protection of existing monopolies, fake innovations to protect patentable revenue streams, and anti competitive regulatory capture.

[robertlagrant]

Almost all of that is fixable by government. It doesn't have to be captured. It's paid out of taxes to not be captured. Monopoly prevention, same. Fake innovations - the way to protect against them is to make sure there's an environment in which competitors can arise.

[kmos17]

In theory yes, in practice in the US today it’s becoming more and more of a fantasy. I hope we can get back there one day, we have the constitutional framework to do so, but the current system is running fast in the opposite direction, one party is rabidly embracing deregulation which will exacerbate these negative points, and the other one failed to live up to its ideals because the entire political class depends on lobbying dollars and was too busy focusing on performative agendas.

[robertlagrant]

Undoing regulatory capture may well involve removing some regulations, though. That won't exacerbate regulatory capture.

[dekhn]

NIH-funded research generates IP owned by the university that contracted with the NIH to do the work. This is due to Bayh-Dole (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh%E2%80%93Dole_Act).