I'll postulate a semi-secret, conspiratorial reason for <i>research</i>: National security!!!<p>Uh, sure, maybe nearly all the research is junk, but tough to PROVE that it's junk and will forever remain junk. Soooo, instead, suddenly some day some research might be revolutionary, powerful enough to affect national security. E.g., one of those math profs working in number theory or <i>modular forms</i>, what can look like really goofy research, 2000 year old number theory questions, might suddenly break all the encryption!!! Or maybe a physics prof will work out quantum gravity, dark matter, or dark energy with big consequences.<p>Soooo, each country that can afford it wants to be out at the frontiers either doing that research or at least being able to understand it if some other country does it first. And if not national security, then the national economy.<p>Soooo, in the committee rooms and offices in Congress, maybe something like "Remember the bomb, the atom BOMB!!! We can't risk falling behind." Or, as J. B. Conant supposedly once said, "... have so many funding sources that they can never all be turned off at the same time". Sooo, have NSF, DARPA, DoE, NRL, .... Right, we can't understand the papers, but the researchers are in an intense competition, trying their best to do good research, to the extent that anyone knows what <i>good</i> research is. And, the profs don't get paid very well -- the research is cheap. Soooo, have grants to MIT, Harvard, Cornell, Cal Tech, etc. Have national labs, LLL, Brookhaven, etc. Pass out the money and relax that we aren't going to be blind sided by Russia, China, ....<p>"Besides, a fraction of the grants is taken by the colleges as <i>overhead</i> so that we are also supporting higher education!" I suggest that Congress can think that way!<p>And, in the game between the US and Russia, publishing openly is essentially a <i>saddle point</i>: If we don't publish, then they won't publish and we won't have their results to build on and they might get ahead of us without our knowing it.