"Without the Gummint, no-one would fund science"?

"Without the Gummint, no-one would fund hard-core science." Really?

Cindy Wu, a recent college graduate, had a great idea — and when she explained it, investors opened up their cheque books. ...
    “Why can’t we just create a Kiva for scientists?” asked her best friend, Denny Luan, a biochemistry and economics major, who had launched a branch of the crowd funded micro-finance site ...
    They started by canvassing hundreds of scientists. “Every single person said, ‘Yes — if you built this, I would use it,’ says Wu. They all had one project they wanted to work on, one idea they had been thinking about for a long time, one thing that they said they would love to devote a lot of time to — but which stood no chance of getting funding from the National Science Foundation or the National Institutes of Health, the two largest sources of science funding in academia.

Story here. (Hat tip Duncan B.]