And I challenge you to demonstrate that Faraday’s discoveries were funded through private enterprise, and not through the state :).
My point isn’t that these discoveries definitely will not lead to profitable applications, its just that right now we can’t specifically foresee any.
Currently, private biotech companies “stand on the shoulders” of discoveries funded by the taxpayer. However, I see no indication that removing that private funding will have it replaced by private funding. I think it more likely that basic/pure research will simply slow down dramatically, and along with it the training of new scientists.
His major discoveries were already made by the time he was made director of the laboratories at the Royal Society, which, no doubt was a better paid and more prestigious position.
As a scientist I am all for funding of science and research, for several reasons. Promoting the Arts and Sciences is one of the FEW enumerated powers of Congress.
While direct funding is not the mentioned mechanism for this promotion of the Arts and Sciences, presently the government taxes take so much ‘air out of the room’, that I support them resupplying science with a decent amount of ‘oxygen’.
Bob Wilson said of Particle Accelerators in specific but of scientific funding and education and projects in general (like going to the Moon), that they had not only to do with national defense (like the Atomic Bomb)....
“It has only to do with the respect with which we regard one another, the dignity of men, our love of culture. It has to do with: Are we good painters, good sculptors, great poets? I mean all the things we really venerate in our country and are patriotic about. It has nothing to do directly with defending our country except to make it worth defending.” Robert R. “Bob” Wilson, Physicist