Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is it that basic research has gone away in industry? Don't we see really interesting stuff coming from Google, pharma, all kinds of materials stuff that we never even see going into textiles and building products... Why would you say that (a) Capitalism has caused basic research to go away, and (b) that it's bad at science in general? Added later: after a moment's thought, it seems to me that we have a great exam…
The problem is that most science that is funded by private companies is done only to further their funding companies' interests, not those of the general populace. For example, Big Pharma has no incentive to make a cheap cancer cure, it makes too much money off of current cancer treatment. Furthermore, the capitalist approach leads to biased results, again, because research has no incentive at that point to be honest…
Except for their competition from other companies making other treatments, and the fact that their patents will run out eventually. Do you really believe that they're not interested in finding an actual cure? I believe that you're viewing these corporations as giant faceless evil monsters. But these corporations are run by, and certainly have researchers who are, real people whose mother was killed by cancer, and worry about that gene popping up in their own children.
the capitalist approach leads to biased results, again, because research has no incentive at that point to be honest
Certainly we've seen an unfortunate amount of dishonest results in recent years. Do you have any evidence that the problem is worse in the private sector? My expectation would be the opposite, because in the private sector you've eventually got to sell something that works, whereas in the public sector you can just keep applying for more grants, leaving behind your previous bogus results.
Let me also throw in that publicly-funded research is biased in a different way. Where the funds go is targeted not on any rational basis, but based on where the well-organized constituencies are. So what we see today is that per-victim, the amount spent on AIDS/HIV research is vastly disproportionate compared to other maladies whose sufferers are from more diffuse demographics. That is, comparing funding of AIDS research to, say, colon cancer, we spend FAR more for each AIDS patient than for each colon cancer patient. The politicization of science leads to waste such as the recent Solaris nonsense, where we allocate funding based on politics and posturing rather than where it will have the most utility across the whole nation.