Which is very hard for things with no market.
I use government libraries. They are free to me. What is the fair market value of that? There are private and subscription libraries, so it's not like no market exists.
What is the fair market value of time on Hubble?
> "if you use that government-paid intern for several hours ... You pay for what you use"
I think you mean $0, not the $7.25 you estimated. Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, an internship is "for the benefit of the intern", not the company. An internship is not supposed to improve the bottom line of a company. An intern may even get in the way, and cause negative value.
And that's my point. The public gains more than can easily be counted by simple, direct market valuation. What is the worth of having students with industrial training? What is the worth of having broad public access to the literature?
Or, for a more real-world case, companies might not be interested in tropical disease research because the revenue won't justify the development costs. But the US military would like to be able to send troops to places with an endemic tropical disease, so they want some way to be able to prevent or treat the disease. The US foreign diplomatic policy would also like the good-will of those countries. The US could, by subsidizing tropical disease research, tilt the "fair market value" so is more weighted towards its military and diplomatic policy goals.
That assumes that part of the corporate revenue comes from subsidy, and part comes from being able to sell the drug on the market. But now, if part of the revenue comes from the government, the company cannot seek patent protection. This reduces the profit expectation, which means the government will need to subsidize the project even more to get a company to be interested in the effort.
You receive no special additional benefit from a library by being a researcher. Everyone can read the same materials as you do. Time on the Hubble costs more than any individual astronomer could pay. If you are keen on closed, private astronomy, you would need to check the NASA budget figures.
If you derive useful benefit from work done at your request, you need to pay the person doing it. If the intern is working for the government for no pay, how would they not just laugh in your face when you ask them to do work for you? You invented the hypothetical; I won't fix it for you.
If the military or state department could derive some benefit from subsidizing private research, they can bloody well do the research on their own. "US Army cures Dengue" would be great for both operations and PR, and would be a much better use of funds than a smart bomb that can stalk you on Facebook and blow up all your friends at the same time as you. If you as a private company want to sell a cure for Dengue on your own, then don't go begging the government for money. Fund it yourself!
Sure. But no grants allow the diversion of fund into private profits, so I don't know what you're referring to.
Take the SBIR grants. It's a way for the government to help small, for-profit companies do the R&D that might lead to results that will benefit the overall US economy and policy. The hope is for the companies to commercialize the results and do well.
It's not money that the SBIR recipients can use to party on Maui. The SBIR system has accounting and oversight in place to help prevent that.
Or, take the (infamous) Bayh–Dole Act. Quoting from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh%E2%80%93Dole_Act :
> The key change made by Bayh–Dole was in ownership of inventions made with federal funding. Before the Bayh–Dole Act, federal research funding contracts and grants obligated inventors (where ever they worked) to assign inventions they made using federal funding to the federal government. Bayh–Dole permits a university, small business, or non-profit institution to elect to pursue ownership of an invention in preference to the government.
That sounds very much like that the public, through its elected officials, don't actually want what you say they want, because what we had was more like what you say we should have, and they decided to change it.
You calculate the fair market value of the public resources you used, and subtract what you paid the public for them. If it is positive, you have a publicly-supported project.
So if you use that government-paid intern for several hours, you ought to pay their agency or department $7.25 for each. You pay for what you use, and there's no problem.
If you work in a government-built facility, and you pay rent for your space, there's no problem. It doesn't matter that the public is your landlord. The space has a market value, and you pay it. There is no net transfer of value to your project at the expense of anyone else. If someone else could make better use of your space, they could have paid higher rent to get it.
If you're accepting a grant, that makes it a bit more difficult for you. If you get $50000, you would have to pay back $50000, plus the interest and the administrative overhead for processing your grant request. And then there's the value of the risk premium and moral hazard. You would have to find some other source of funding to "close" the research, and it would have to do it before starting work. Otherwise, potentially profitable projects could get privatized just before triggering the public release requirement, and the money sinks would be left as public.
If you use public funds to buy equipment for a publicly supported project, and then later want to use it for a private project, you have three options: lease it from the public project, or pay the depreciated value of the equipment to buy it outright, or make your private project publicly-supported.
It isn't any more complicated than the GPL copyleft. If you use GPL'ed code, you have to make public everything you do with it. If you don't want to do that, don't use GPL'ed code.