Finn here and i know the game and company and by no means Im not downplaying what you said but; In general - there are quite a few possibilities to apply for grants and similar monetary benefits from the goverment, municipalities and few ngo's here. And as a finn - I would find it actually miraculous that company such as Colossal Order would have never ever benefited from public funding.
But what is the alternative? You need a generic way of deciding who gets how much money and I don't see another way except for the whole project application process. The only alternative is someone gives money to things he likes... Companies can afford that but the public sector cannot because it is ripe for corruption.
It is a big mistake to think that merely paying taxes is a sufficient substitute for donations. Governments are like the biggest of big companies: they tend to be very conservative about what they'll fund. Individual donors and small foundations play a crucial role in funding the sort of risky outliers that new ideas come from.
Government funding is extremely wasteful and will generally go into the pockets of the well connected. The problem is this game has been played for a long time and it has diminishing returns. The players have had decades to get the exploitation down.
Yes sillicon valley exists because of government money. But that was like 70 years ago. The world has changed and corruption is more severe. You will get no such bang for your government grant buck now.
What exactly's your point? A "department of the Olgino Troll Factory" that directly benefits a vast portion of the world's population? That, again, only happened because of government—and therefore taxpayer—coin? That has no direct or indirect involvement in government, democracy, or harm of any living entity?
Haven't thought from that perspective. Indeed, I would no doubt invest the money much better than the local government, which is pretty much incompetent in almost all areas of social improvement... Thanks for commenting!
That puts the decision on where to put public good will and non-profitable money sinks solely into the machine of government bureaucracy, which I don't think would be very effective.
Currently we incentivize private individual donations, and that lets a lot of things happen quickly and without the requirement of soliciting the permission of a bottlenecked council for anything to happen.
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