It's a false dichotomy to say that you can only choose between 20 year research and 1 year marketing. Plenty of private money goes into research with long term payoff. There are private companies engaged in fusion research, because the payoff is huge if it is achieved. Even the public money that goes into publicly funded research comes from private earnings in the first place. So science and free markets are absolutely suited to each other. That's before we even start discussing corruption of objectives in totalitarian states, based on leaders whims (ie, Nazi science research, Lysenko etc)