Had the government not taxed the wealth that funded that research, those who produced that wealth would have used it for things they value more.
Only time will tell. The past doesn't necessarily corroborate your views.
Time will not tell. That is the very point. We can't have two versions of society running side by side, with a government control and an anarchist experiment. Well, we can sort of. That was the original idea behind the seperate soverignty of the individual states of the US, but we don't really have that experiment anymore. Some people simply aren't willing to let the experiment be long enough to have a conclusive outcome. It's simply against their nature.