This displays a profound ignorance of the real situation, which is that the majority of useful early stage research is funded by philanthropy. Not by government, not by companies, but by people making donations. It doesn't come from the existing funding institutions because they almost never fund anything that hasn't already had its prototype and early stage research completed successfully. If you don't have your proof of concept you are not getting funded, and the institutions don't really care about where the starting point of the pipeline actually comes from. Every lab scrapes out funding from the corners of existing grants and petitions patrons to conduct what is arguably their most important work, which is to say the actual work of taking risks and creating new things.

What most people call research grants are nothing of the sort. They are development grants. The research already happened, and it was paid for by bootstrapped philanthropy.