Not really. I do see a staggering amount of waste though. Duplicated effort across the board, re-invention of the same basic building blocks re-packaged and re-branded, billions spent on patent suits, billions spent on lobbying, etc. Competition in basic innovation does not make sense. In fact I'm not even sure how much of those "trillions" contributed to actual innovation. I suspect a proper analysis would reveal an extremely poor efficiency ratio and only a few keystones that could trace their history directly back to a university research projects and other state sponsored projects.
LOL, you see "a staggering amount of waste" in commercial entities and thing the way to find efficiency is to look to the government? Like government-sponsored research is going to be more efficient? That's a good one.
Basic research is exactly the kind of thing that markets are bad at doing, so it really wouldn't be surprising. Which country do you see as a model of the success of privately funded research? As far as I can see, all countries that are making significant contributions to science are spending lots of government money on it.
