Comment by mike_hearn

It's about independence. Academic funding committees are not distributed or independent in any meaningful way. They might appear to be physically spread around the country, but look at what happened once the Trump admin came in. Academic funding policies changed over night.

In an unplanned economy, people make decisions about how to allocate their own resources, in the hope of earning a profit. There are not institutes setting policy frameworks that they have to follow, or committees arguing about how to give away money that they didn't earn to begin with.