It wouldn't be so bad if the public could just benefit directly from the research without having to pay a company too. In this scheme, companies are glorified middlemen/marketing boondoggles. In fact, they represent tremendous inefficiencies in the economy. On the flip side, consider that government can do things that companies can't. They can run production at a loss. This is extremely important if you want to avoid things like economic depressions.
Forums unfortunately do not fully lend themselves to working through arguments like these.
The only way that the government can run production at a loss is by forcefully taking resources from the people. It will do so either through direct taxation or inflation. Once that resource is depleted government will collapse and yield that it too is not immune to the law of natural consequences. Take the collapse of the Soviet Union as an example.
It is unfortunate that the argument persists that either the New Deal or WW2 "pulled" the economy out of the great depression. Due to consistent government intervention the economy took a decade to restructure itself. Industries that did not produce or provide that which ordinary people could use needed to be shut down and the resources (human and otherwise) reassigned to active sections of the economy. The economy recovers once this restructuring is underway, once people have to quit their jobs as SUV sales people and instead go be hybrid car sales people. It is akin to constantly sending out fire fighting teams in an ecosystem that is dependent on seeds being exposed to extreme heat to germinate. People do not want to face the painful restructuring process and instead prolong the suffering.
The above process can happen in spite of consistent government intervention but what is not valid is to say that since it happened we can only be thankful since imagine how long it would have taken without the government intervention.
Saying that companies that deliver things are inefficiencies is like saying arteries are inefficiencies since they require resources and only add to the distance blood needs to travel to an organ.
Now the individual will of people not "perfect" but it can organize resources faster and more accurately than any central planning body has ever proven to.