For background, I'm getting a PhD in CS.
It seems like research labs are few and far between, and (unfortunately) I can't stay a grad student forever.
Instead you could work in Ad targeting/personalization, where you will help trick people into clicking on ads for products they have no interest in, while invading their privacy in borderline-illegal ways.
Or you could do for-profit research whose only purpose is to convince decision makers to buy X, regardless of the true reality. (drug companies put billions into this type of work)
Or you could work in Microsoft Research or similar environments. It is actually quite similar to academia in many regards. The funding is also mostly taken by force (of monopoly, many individuals and companies have no choice but to work in Microsoft Office due to deliberate format incompatibilities).
I know IBM have a pretty big research organisation, but how easy it is to get there, and how secure the positions are I have no idea.
I don't really see why taxpayer funded research is bad, and I say that as a taxpayer not a researcher.
That's strange. If you do your job properly, why shouldn't you get paid even if it is by the taxpayer?
And even there, you could say everyone is "stealing" from the public goods all the time. (if you hunt and eat an animal, then you have stolen it from the rest of the people).
What is a public good? Who decides what is public?
If I hunt and eat an wild animal, i.e. one that was not raised on a farm, I am not stealing it from anyone. By your definition the only way I am not stealing it is if I kill it and divide equally to everyone.
To pay less taxes you could either relocate to some place with less taxes (this is quite possible in the US, since state and city taxes vary). Or you could work democratically to change the system. If you really want to live in any place approximating anarcho-capitalism, you would have to move to a 3rd world country.
If one could opt out of taxes, that would be the end of the tax system. Of course no individual wants to pay for the public services. Everybody want the other guy to pay! In the same manner, you could ask why one cannot opt out of the penal system. --- As to the "hunting as theft" issue: as long as there are plenty of animals to hunt, you are not taking from anyone. That was the state of affairs 100,000 years ago. When resources are limited they must be managed/taxed in some way. Humanity has not solved most of these issues at this point. See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
So you could ask: when did I agree to those japanese fishing vessels depleting the fisheries next to my shores, do I have a choice in the matter? Their fishing raises the price of wild fish and serves as a de-facto sushi tax, only you don't get to eat any of the sushi...
My point is, we are not in the paleolithic period anymore. The world is too complex and resources are too few for fully individualistic economic philosophies.
Look at the decoding of the human genome. No company has a patent on that because public institutions did it first.
If you're curious, here's a patent list and some background on the company:
https://www.celera.com/celera/intellectual_property
Sure, oil companies spill oil sometimes; but they (should) have to pay for that.
Big telcos tend to have monopoly status, and exploit consumers, but they do that not because they are companies, but because they are in a patron-client relationship with the government.
Some companies produce tremendous benefit to society; others produce small benefits, which matter a lot in the aggregate.
For example, at my current job, I have plenty of time to sit around and think about new trading strategies and no deadline for producing one that makes it into production. New ideas then go through prototype and back-testing stages, and most never see the light of day. This isn't at all considered to be a problem.
The only bullet point that my job doesn't satisfy is the first-- the types of strategies I'm working on simply aren't sufficiently deep to warrant investing years in developing the initial version of any one of them.
I'm not sure of the situation in the US but in Canada we have something called: Scientific Research & Experimental Development (SRED) program, where the government will reimburse a company a percent of the money spent on R&D.