> From what I've seen, the main points are that academia isn't efficient, most of the science coming out of academia is useless and that the whole system is just a waste of taxpayers money. Instead, what is often argued, all good research is done in private labs. Then pointing to SpaceX, Moderna, OpenAI, Google, etc.

Well... that's "starve the beast" in action. A lot of things we take for granted, that underpin our modern ways of life, came to be due to government investing. Laser, radar, microwaves, the early Internet, that all was military R&D.

"Unfortunately" (well, for the rich and the MIC, at least) there is no way for people to siphon off money in government-funded research, so once the libertarian/small-state BS completely took over following the collapse of the USSR, a lot of that got torn down or supplemented with enough bureaucracy to make Germans cry... and that's why reusable rockets were not invented at NASA but at SpaceX instead.