> "The public does not want its funds diverted into private profits, period" Sure. But no grants allow the diversion of fund into private profits, so I don't k

> "The public does not want its funds diverted into private profits, period" Sure. But no grants allow the diversion of fund into private profits, so I don't know what you're referring to. Take the SBIR grants. It's a way for the government to help small, for-profit companies do the R&D that might lead to results that will benefit the overall US economy and policy. The hope is for the companies to commercialize the results and do well. It's not money that the SBIR recipients can use to party on Maui. The SBIR system has accounting and oversight in place to help prevent that. Or, take the (infamous) Bayh–Dole Act. Quoting from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh%E2%80%93Dole_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh%E2%80%93Dole_Act : > The key change made by Bayh–Dole was in ownership of inventions made with federal funding. Before the Bayh–Dole Act, federal research funding contracts and grants obligated inventors (where ever they worked) to assign inventions they made using federal funding to the federal government. Bayh–Dole permits a university, small business, or non-profit institution to elect to pursue ownership of an invention in preference to the government. That sounds very much like that the public, through its elected officials, don't actually want what you say they want, because what we had was more like what you say we should have, and they decided to change it.