Bell Labs was only pseudo private. The government required they have that research lab in exchange for being allowed to have a monopoly. One should also consider that institutions like that were partly so productive for being at the right place and time in history, when we were developing the tools to exploit the low hanging fruit nature has to offer us. That whole era, we snatched it all up quick. Spaceflight and such didn't stagnate after because we turned to idiots, but because mass and aerodynamic drag and Newton impose pretty inalienable constraints.
I was watching a good documentary about Bardeen and Shockley and their development of semiconductor tech in the 50s. The military got their hands on some of their samples and work and put together a team to try to work out how they were doing it. The scientists they were interviewing were very depressed because for every month of progress they made catching up to Bardeen and Shockley, those guys would be a further 3 months ahead of them by then.
My point is, you can make claims about Bell labs being semi private, but that doesn't explain why all the innovation happened at Bell Labs and not at some fully government run lab or the military. The government couldn't even keep up with them when they knew what to do, forget about the government actually initiating that kind of research.
In the last 50 years almost nothing has come out of government research. All innovation has occurred in the private sector, or privately owned research universities. At best, the government has succeeded in some cases where government funded academics managed to get private funding from industry.
An excellent book that needs to be read carefully by many college students, including engineers, scientists, political scientists, and business students.
