I don't. I am a (small-l) libertarian myself. A (small-o) objectivist, in fact.
Is it possible to find basic research that is privately funded? Yes, you can find a little bit. Does that mean that the responsibility for basic research should be transferred to the private sector? No, it does not. Basic research, almost by construction, is not directly profitable (although it sometimes works out that way). American business (which is where the real money is) should not be expected to do anything that is not oriented towards turning a profit. The responsibility of a company is to its shareholders, not to the advancement of the Nation. Nevertheless, the advancement of the Nation must be provided for, and basic research is an indispensable means of doing that.
Grid computing is now being applied to a number of commercial problems, such as protein folding to test the effectiveness of new cancer drugs. Could any government program have produced spinoffs like that?
Why, yes. Grid technology itself came out of Argonne National Laboratory. I said I was programming for a private company. Do you know what i3ARCHIVE does? It brings Grid technology to bear on the problem of digital mammography. It is the commercialization of a government-sponsored Grid effort called the National Digital Mammography Archive. (I was on the team that originally designed that Grid.)
I'm not arguing that all research can be moved to the private sector. I'm arguing that private research extends into many areas beyond the short-term commercial profits that its detractors claim is all it's good for. Scientific research, public or private, is done by science geeks. Much corporate research is done by science geeks who piggyback their most speculative ideas on the back of commercial R & D that is pitched to management for short-term profit.
Liberals might also want to note that the most effective way to get the government to plunge into your research area, no-holds-barred, and keep the flat-earth lobby from ruining your efforts is to militarize it. That is how nuclear technology got its start at Los Alamos, and how JFK got us to the Moon. The most generally-useful-to-all-mankind government program of the last generation, the Global Positioning System, was also implemented as a military project. The public may see it purely as satellite technology, but it actually incorporates relativistic physics.
Grid technology itself came out of Argonne National Laboratory
In the same sense that the idea of the Internet originated at DARPA, as a means of networking highly dissimilar supercomputers. The DARPA people themselves not only had no idea that their half-formed idea was commercially applicable, but had no idea what commercial research was needed to create the Internet we know today. The government researchers' attitude, as I remember from U of California in the earliest days of large-scale networking, was that letting hoi polloi on would cause a traffic nightmare, and had to be avoided at all costs. Private researchers, on the other hand, spend their careers knowing that commercial requirements and basic research are locked in an intricate dance. Bringing DARPA's inchoate idea to market required Ethernet, high-speed routers, fiber, lasers, the DNS, and a host of other results of commercial research. To return to our question at hand, how long would it have taken the Argonne grid project to evolve by itself into the SETI@home application we know today?