Totally disagree. Carnegie Institutions, Wellcome Trust, etc. are all 'private sector' and dispense millions of dollars of grants for fundamental research.
You probably mean, 'for-profit private sector'. But then, you disregard the several Nobel prizes that Bell Labs received, the intangible impact of IBM's Deep Blue and other programs on computing, etc. If solving a basic-science problem can result in several million dollars of revenue, you can be sure that a company will throw money and man-power at it. There are several examples even among the non-Bell Labs, non-IBM, non-Xerox companies: Google's search algorithms, pharma companies' Lipitor, Viagra, etc., Intel and AMD's industry-defining minuaturizations, 3M's optical films, etc. etc.
You probably mean, 'for-profit private sector'. But then, you disregard the several Nobel prizes that Bell Labs received, the intangible impact of IBM's Deep Blue and other programs on computing, etc. If solving a basic-science problem can result in several million dollars of revenue, you can be sure that a company will throw money and man-power at it. There are several examples even among the non-Bell Labs, non-IBM, non-Xerox companies: Google's search algorithms, pharma companies' Lipitor, Viagra, etc., Intel and AMD's industry-defining minuaturizations, 3M's optical films, etc. etc.