The way it works today, mutatis mutandis, is more like a "hacker space" than anything else: you get, if lucky, some shared shoebox as an office; a parked website domain maybe; and some rather vague and guarded promise of institutional support... But other than that you run your lab essentially like a startup: you are responsible for securing funding for equipment, salaries --yes, including your own!-- and workspaces. And if you can't, you close down: as simple as that.

So the oft-cited 'advantage' of having a steady supply of quasi-indentured post-docs and grad students to horribly exploit is only half the story: if you just don't have the funding, you can't hire them. Note that in this (restricted) sense, throwing more money at the problem would indeed help towards the solution.

It's quite grueling and ridiculous when you think of it, especially in this era of billions and billions of dollars in endowment at your typical RU/VH...

Our grants and the university-provided lab startup funds bought the smaller stuff -- EEGs, eye-trackers, etc -- which ran in the thousands of dollars. The university financed the building and some of the maintenance of the larger stuff like the fMRI facilities we used, and we paid hourly to use them.

A similar system could be established here, or investigators could contract work out to 3rd party companies or even other university core labs which frequently allow unaffiliated investigators access, albeit at a higher price.