You're right, we do have a communist research system but it doesn't work well. It has flooded the scientific literature with endless torrents of non-replicable P-hacked pseudo-science. Who still takes social science at face value? And it's not just that field, COVID revealed that the entire public health space is run by people who systematically don't care about the scientific method and use it only as far as needed to convince the gullible to obey them. There are lots of fields like this. They look scientific but aren't.
Meanwhile, where are the real tech breakthroughs coming from? The tech industry, by and large, an industry that is flooded with academic refugees. Even biotech is a huge disappointment.
You're right that the current research system has problems. I would disagree with the claim that these problems are clearly getting worse when looking at it globally and at the scale of decades. On that scale, I would also disagree that private industry clearly contributes more than the research system. There are also many ways in which the system is being improved.
Science is on average immensely useful but in many cases too risky/costly for private buisness to fund it, given the current scale and power of private businesses. Such research can therefore not exist under the free market model and we have to use a different model. That's what we're doing while trying to improve the model.
I used to believe that, but no longer do. Private industry can build rockets, self driving cars, LLMs and other hugely expensive things. Academia can't. What are these huge risks that academia can take that private science won't?
Also, lately it feels like there's a huge misinformation problem created by public sector science. Viruses leaking from labs is only a tiny fraction of the problem and that's already bad enough.
Tech industry that's often using models developed by academics, you mean. OTOH you can point to plenty of companies that exist to get a round of investor money, pay founders, then to just dissolve. There's a balance between having a world where everyone is phacking and one where everyone is trying to fleece investors to buy their junk startup so they can get the hell out of it.
Meanwhile, where are the real tech breakthroughs coming from? The tech industry, by and large, an industry that is flooded with academic refugees. Even biotech is a huge disappointment.