Is government funding necessary for "pure" science?

Ronald Bailey looks at a new book by Terence Kealey:

Kealey traces the fits and starts of technological progress through stagnant Bronze Age empires like Egypt and Assyria to the technologically innovative small merchant cultures such as the Phoenicians, Philistines, and Lydians that made crucial advances like the alphabet, ironworking, and coins. Technology stagnated under the Romans and surprisingly made headway during the Dark Ages which saw the invention of three-field crop rotation, the heavy plow and the horse collar which lifted food production by more than 40 percent. These inventions arose in areas of northern Europe where farmers sold food to city markets. This meant that they could specialize in growing food and obtain other goods they needed in trade from city dwellers. In the deep countryside where feudalism held sway, crop yields did not markedly improve for centuries. The period also saw the invention of windmills, trousers, butter, barrels, and buttons.

Then came the Renaissance in Italian merchant cities which invented double entry bookkeeping. This advance in accounting enabled enterprises to accumulate debts and credits in their own rights, making them entities separate from any individual. Italians also invented insurance to cover the risks of trading. The first stock exchange opened in Antwerp in 1460. Kealey then takes us to the dawn of the Industrial Revolution which again took off in small trading countries, especially the Netherlands and England. The common thread that he identifies is that technology takes off when individual and property rights are recognized.

Kealey shows in nearly every case the crucial inventions of the past two and half centuries were called forth by markets, not invented by scientists working from ivory towers. These include the steam engine, cotton gin, textile mills, railroad engines, the revolver, the electric motor, telegraph, telephone, incandescent light bulb, radio, the airplane — the list is nearly endless.

All of this is undeniably true, but it doesn't address the constant refrain from the institutional scientific world: that these are all merely "technological" inventions, not pure science. The usual claim is that private enterprise can't or won't fund basic scientific research because there will be no obvious way to profit from the research — and it won't provide the investigator with a temporary monopoly from which to derive the profits to pay for the research in the first place.

There are lots of data points which indicate that government funding in R&D will actually slow down private investment in that area: for the obvious reason that the government has deeper pockets than most private organizations and is not directly influenced by the profit motive . . . if someone else is already working in that area (and you'll eventually get access to whatever they come up with anyway), you're better off to devote your resources to something else.