Except, they don't. Mostly because of the "incentives" that Eric Schmidt mentioned. Science has always happened at the public purse for a reason - the timeline for returns is so unclear, and the timespan for fruition is so long that most people don't want to invest in this kind of science, rightly so.
Goddard's research, or heck even the Wright Brothers, to go from a smidgen to the Saturn V or Boeing 737, took decades of funding and research over time spans that are just too long for most investors and human beings.
I know some contemporary investors are trying to be ambitious and change this, which is something I applaud them for. But their inputs are still focussed on bringing technologies to commercialization, not the greenfield research needed to produce the next paradigm.
For example, during the US' Apollo Program, the necessity of a lightweight, power-efficient, and resilient navigation led to a radical design proposal that suggested a computer designed entirely out of Integrated Circuits (ICs). At the time, the IC industry had barely entered its cradle, with the "monolithic concept" having been invented less than 2 years before the proposed design. The Apollo Guidance Computer was the technology's first major application and became the first computer built from Integrated Circuits.
But the technology was too immature. They just didn't have production processes that could produce ICs at any level of reliability. It took nearly 5 years of collaboration between NASA, MIT, Fairchild Semiconductors, Texas Instruments, and others to create scalable and reliable processes to bring the Integrated Circuit concept to the mass production.
During this time, the Apollo Program consumed nearly 60% of all production capacity in the world. Without this effort, the advent of the personal computer would likely have been pushed back by a decade or more, due to low general interest in the risky new technology.
https://twitter.com/_areoform/status/1319694832311304192
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Testing this assumption.
There is an easy test for this assumption. Apple has $192.8 billion in cash on hand. What exactly is it doing with this money? Is it spending it on fundamental research in optics, laser communication, optical computing, and other stuff? No, it's not. Apple invests about $16bn a year on "R&D" which includes new product development and seeking marginal gains for production processes. Even here they do so with the help of Government funding. Yes, Apple applies for Government grants and R&D tax incentives.
What about Google? They had Google X, but it was short-lived, and they've broken up their most ambitious projects (which now seem to be withering). These projects will be dead far short of the multi-decade timeline needed to bring things to fruition. And they have $120 billion in cash lying around.
Google's pattern seems to be, they make a flashy announcement, and then they bail from putting long-term, significant capital where their mouth is. Take Calico for example, what's going on there? It seems to have a foot in the grave, and it's less than a decade old.
This isn't Google's fault, it's what investors want. They just aren't patient enough for Google to deploy the unproductive capital they already have into long-term research;
https://realmoney.thestreet.com/investing/technology/alphabe...
https://www.engadget.com/2020-02-20-alphabet-makani-chronicl...
https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/is-alphabet-thinking-of-its-...
They don't see it as an investment into the future. They see it as a "money losing segment".
There will never be groundbreaking photonics Google research or a Google particle accelerator, simply because the "incentive structure" won't allow it.
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This fact translates geographies.
Furthermore, do people in low-tax jurisdictions and countries do more groundbreaking R&D? Places like Singapore and Hong Kong? As far as I can tell, no, they don't. Even there, what little research that gets done is on the taxpayer's dime.
This pattern has repeated itself across history & geography. There must be a reason for it. Saying that it's because Government takes away money and creates pressure on corporations + individuals which forfeits such private efforts denies the reality;
With few exceptions, almost every single breakthrough from the discovery of the Americas to the first computers has occurred on the taxpayer's dime. Or, more accurately, it has been performed by organizations who can afford to have some goals on decades-to-centuries long time horizons.
It is important to realize this dichotomy to understand why public funding matters, and why even today, for the pharma industry, the vast majority of targets and agents being tested have been/were funded/identified with public money.