You can either have academic labs researching things which are commercially interesting, and then give the professors working on it the perk of having the opportunity to commercialize it first (or at least royalties), or you can have academic labs researching things which the professor is academically interested in, and hope that it is commercially interesting. It is difficult to get both.
Either you get people complaining that publicly funded research isn't free to the public to use, or you get people complaining that stuff invented in academia has no practical application. And since there aren't any industrial research labs left, that means either no commercially interesting research, or encumbered research.
Not to mention that it would be *damn* hard to get professors to work for peanuts (seriously, I've seen what these people make for their qualifications) while training basically all high-skill future scientists, and under a contract where all work they do they can't even commercialize because some big company will snap it up underneath them.
No, I'm afraid that I have to disagree with your position. Yes, I have a bias because I am working very hard to commercialize technology that my lab invented, but I also think that is is more than fair to give the actual inventors first dibs on trying to commercialize something. I would have left academia in a hurry and just did all my work as a trade secret pretty quickly otherwise.
National labs of course are a totally different story. Usually their inventions are licensed under reasonable terms in only non-exclusive licenses. But those inventors are *working* for the government as opposed to just having a small fraction of their costs paid for by a government grant.