Most major advances in science are the result of brainpower, and not laboratory "research."Ridiculous. You can't do any sort of science with theory alone. Theory must be complemented by experiment, or it cannot be connected to the real world. It's just pointless navel-gazing.
If something truly requires millions and billions of dollars of research, then that money is far better spent by the private sector,
With some rare exceptions, the private sector does not do basic research, and won't. But all of the applied research done by industry is predicated upon the discoveries made by basic research.
which can do the job most efficienty and focus it on commercial returns.
The purpose of basic research is not commercial returns. The purpose is to gain the understanding that will someday be required for future economic, military and survival-oriented endeavors.
But if it's commercial returns you're after, then you should be perfectly happy with high energy physics. A single spinoff technology--the World Wide Web you're using right now--has generated enough commercial returns to pay for the entire worldwide effort in high energy physics from the beginning of time onward.
You have clearly been brainwashed by the academy. I'm surprised that you are even conservative, given the left-wing biases of virtually all discplines (check on research from the Hoover Institute to back my claims).
All of the basic Internet protocols existed in commercial form from vendors such as IBM and Wang long before they were ever standardized on the Internet. We would probably have a more robust Internet if we had to communicate between robust protocols rather than relying on a common inplementation of TCP/IP.
It was a fait accompli that all these networked computers would want to communicate with each other. You may not be aware that Netscape was threatened with a legal shutdown because they had supposedly relied on the "open source" of the NCSA Mosaic browser.
I have never seen an academic or government lab run with any sense of efficiency or purpose. They are all hegemons intending to enrich their chiefs. I can't tell you of how many people have had their work stolen or forced to accept non-existent co-authors because of this reality.
The work of Bell Labs IBM labs, and probably soon from Microsoft, will and had been more important that what comes from academia. Neither Newton nor Einstein had labs, and Waston and Crick did no original research beyond stealing the X-Ray crystalography from their coworker and deriding her in print. Most of the great contributors to British science in the 19th century were men of commerce.
If you want to see what real phsycicists can do with mind power alone and outside of the academy, I recommend you attend the "Storrs" (?) conference coming up soon, which is where truly innovative minds meet.