If you compare how much money is spend on fundamental research (or research in general), the pool of funds for a given direction is not limited because of other research. It's limited by all the other things we spend money on. If society wants to fund more DM, astro, whatever research, it would be much easier to find that money for example in the military spending. A minimal haircut there and you could double the research funding.
As opposed to? This sentiment was bandied around a lot before the LHC went online, but no one ever had a proposition of what the alternative was is the goal was to advance fundamental particle physics. You've got exactly 2 ways to probe subatomic interactions: (1) particle accelerator measurement and (2) incidental measurements of high-energy spaceborne collisions.
We're doing both. Theoreticians being unable to conclusively find a new measurement is a problem independent of the fact the LHC exists to do those sorts of measurements that they'd need.
The Standard Model is a bit of a franken-theory of a thing, a kit of parts bolted together in awkward ways. It looks a lot like the pre-quantum ad-hoc theories that attempted to describe quantum effects before QM was invented.
It's hard to believe that physics can't do better. But easy to believe that physics won't do better while most of the money and all of the mental space is owned by concepts that are more than a hundred years old now.
Add to that that experimental physics is simply far more expensive then theoretical physics, and it should come as no surprise that we spend more money on experiments then pure theory.
The complaint about LHC is more about questioning weather spending $5 billion to smash protons together is the most effective way of getting more empirical evidence to the physicists.
About the same as a the price of a large modern sports club in a top league[0]
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/football/2022/apr/29/chelsea-sir...
Providing better bounds on the (non-)existence of phenomena predicted by existing non-Standard Model particle physics theories sounds like a worthwhile endeavor rather than praying that particle accelerators will maybe uncover a particle if you give it just a little bit more juice.
Sabine has recommended funding more telescopes to learn more about dark matter.
You'd be equally opposed to Sabine's alternative since what use is knowing anything about dark matter? For that matter who cares where the universe came from. What have telescopes helped us with lately?
This is not true! There's much more to particle physics than simply hunting for new particles. Our knowledge of even the particles we know to exist is massively incomplete. Several next-gen collider proposals are for "Higgs factories" to study the Higgs boson better, for example.