Libertarianism vs. tax-funded basic research

> Sounds like you support our tax money being used to develop products
> that commercial vendors get to sell back to us tax
> payers... Something wrong with that !

I haven't worked out an answer yet that completely satisfies me.

I am sufficiently libertarian-esque that I would rather this whole
area of government be decommissioned. But having paid for EMC, I'm
not going to pretend it doesn't exist.

I recognize that tax-funded research is not 100% waste, that things
like modern Unix and the Internet came from it. But maybe it's still
95% waste, and thus still should be decommissioned. Or maybe EMC is
too close to commercial practice, and tax-funded research should be
limited to blue-sky things. But if they're blue-sky, who's to say the
investment is a sound one?

Unfortunately, the property mechanisms that would allow business to
make a payback from basic research (like high-energy physics) are
probably too obnoxious. Imagine if Calculus was patented.
Libertarianism requires a completely toll-booth world, but nobody I
know wants to live in one, including me.

Perhaps an incremental improvement would be to keep the public domain
release from the government from getting lost. Maybe it should be
archived by the library of congress? And referenced in vendor
advertising for the first n years? If the PD version was permanently
available, then the vendor could only charge for the improvements they
make, not for the value of the whole thing.

One option I haven't mentioned yet is that nobody does basic research.
But then would the US be competitive with other countries who do?

Brian