" public funding has been at providing a balance to biased study "
Would that 'twere so!!
Biased gummint-funded "research" has been handed down as gospel - and been the basis for a lot of bad legislation - on subjects such as "global warming", "secondhand smoke", and virtually every sociological/psychological "study" in the past 50 years.
Sorry -- public funding of research has no better track record, in the realm of 'bias', than any other source of funding.
Sorry, but you're using poor logic.
I stated that it has provided a balance to biased study (e.g., pharmaceuticals)... I never stated that it will do so in all cases. That's part of my point of why it's easy to kneejerk the opposite way--there are examples of very poor uses of public fnding. Same goes for public funding of art--we hear lots of horror stories, but (like with Iraq) there are many "silent successes."
The real question is how to set up a system that allocates public funding in the best interest of the public...and since the public's "best interest" is disparate by nature, this is not simple. Personally, I would like to see the rest of the world pick up more of the burden of basic research to allow more of American funding to go toward development-phase work.