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The free market can only be trusted to further science only in circumstances where it is exceedingly obvious that furthering science will be profitable.
For example: most of the material data available for steel and aluminum alloys is available because of the auto and aerospace industries, and it was because they foresaw that it would be profitable to perform experiments and collect data.
That isn't to say that business wouldn't invest money in buying up patents for technology that could potentially put them out of business- to deny this is to be naive.
Another example: the free market would never have given us the space program, nor probably any of the resulting technologies.
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