Couldn't find the person you wanted to argue with in the comments so you just pretended they are here and claim the community is "part of the problem" even though you couldn't actually find one of them.
It isn’t anti-intellectual to say that most of what the US federal government does would be better performed by private industry.
The problem is that industry is inherently narrowly focused in short-to-medium term profitability, and cannot be relied on to carry out work which benefits society as a whole, including many conventionally “intellectual” pursuits such as: educating the populace, or fundamental research with no clear path to monetization.
Yes, private schools do both of these things, but in both cases they are only doing so by means of public funding.
Long-term projects with a fairly well-paved path to monetization. If industry was willing to invest in things like pure mathematics, or deep space astronomy, or just generally subsidizing smart people to investigate things they think are interesting, we wouldn’t need the NSF.
The point is that the efficiency of the private sector is a Faustian bargain: it comes at the cost of expecting an ROI for the investigators.
A small minority of the private sector is burning money on long-term investments. Another small minority are burning money on ventures which cannot be monetized. At their intersection, there exists zero companies. Yes, zero. Not close to zero, just zero. And it will always be zero.
How will you survive if what you're doing takes both a lot of time and makes no money?
Think about something like the FDA. It's a cost sink. The private sector will never do something like that because it's explicitly anti-profit.
I don’t believe so, no, but even if they were - isn’t funding private businesses to do research (that have a stake in success) better than the state doing it directly and not caring if it works or is effective or not?
You'd have to make that case. Even the naive answer would be 'no' but I can't think of a reason why a narrowly focused business is better than a government-backed enterprise when it comes to doing research. It's not worse necessarily, but it's not better either.
