Like your other interlocutor, I find your stance here too rigid. Here's the example that struck me: "... finding the cure for cancer. That is not going to be

Like your other interlocutor, I find your stance here too rigid. Here's the example that struck me: "... finding the cure for cancer. That is not going to be centrally planned. You can throw all the money you want at the problem, government or private. ... No amount of money is going to dig-up that solution until it, well, just happens." You're setting up a strawman here which indicates you don't know how large scientific problems are solved. In particular -- it's not like there is some grand plan that starts now and ends with "the" cure for cancer. But there is a method, that can be successful in solving hard problems. There will be one or several advisory boards of people who have basically dedicated their life to aspects of the problem (e.g., a subcommittee of the National Academy of Science). Their expertise will be staggering. They will produce a roadmap. It will be followed (mostly) for a while, with government or private sponsors. Over time, ideas will be funded and pan out or not, the board(s) will change, roadmaps are redrawn, and directions shift. It's not some fixed plan. There are revolutions in disciplines, when people decide that prior approaches didn't work, and just abandon them. Staying at the forefront is highly competitive, because you're basically competing with the best people in the world. Maybe (as has been the case with cancer) people will decide that it's a harder problem than first supposed, that there are a multitude of causes, some with easier solutions and some whose solution is still unknown. Maybe (as with numerical weather prediction) the progress will be rather amazing, and in a couple of decades you will have a robust system that people take for granted, but that was just a crazy dream, originally. Hey, that's progress for you. Private enterprise didn't develop and test NWP. And it certainly couldn't have been solved by cottage entrepreneurs. My overall points: (1) There is a large class of important technical problems that are not solvable by small entrepreneurs, or even by corporations. (2) The "big science" solutions that have been developed do not use some kind of state-planning-from-1950 paradigm -- they are much more adaptive and competitive than you seem to believe. I agree that my perspective above is influenced by the problems I have worked on in my life, and observed others (more gifted than I) work on.