Most of this work is publicly funded. They whole VC industry is built on it. It should return more of its profits to the public, just as it would to early-stage investors.
That's what public funding of research work is for.
Basically, there's a continuum ranging from public research (i.e., high-risk, high-impact) to industrial research and startups (medium risk, medium-to-high impact) to common adoption (low risk, low impact).
Ok, I'll bite. Next time you invest in a startup, or if you ever were to, you agree to forego equity. Instead take a cut of the sales tax, a job, and the opportunity to purchase the product. Fair deal?
The question is, would an angel investor take that deal? The answer is obvious: no way.
An analogy would be if we all belonged to a VC fund, and the fund manager took a deal where instead of equity they take a cut of future sales tax. Imagine that. No way you'd consider that a fair deal, even if the startup produced some nice products and job opportunities.
You'd want equity if it was your personal investment. Why should it be any different for taxpayer funds?
Individuals are generally selfish and don't think very well about collective society good, but ever since the Neolithic revolution we've been pretty good about collective investment and risk.
Asking for direct obvious returns from research funds means much useful research won't get done, and researchers will focus on more incremental surer bets (like industrial research or startups). We'd just completely kill our society's competitiveness and might as well start learning Chinese to better welcome our Han overlords.
The entire U.S. system of public high tech investment is mostly done under the pretext of military spending. The military has specific objectives and is looking for clear ROI, but that doesn't impair their ability to invest in core science. They just take a longer term view.
Licensing core tech (instead of giving it away) is not the same as asking for direct returns. It's just giving the taxpayers their fair share of the eventual returns on their investment, instead of letting VCs collect it all.
The whole space program was about developing ICBMs. WII led to huge technological advances (computers for one), etc...
I'm not sure what the mix today is between military-oriented and social-oriented spending is. The fed obviously give lots of money to lots of research universities, medical oriented research with no obvious military applications coming up at the top of list.
