I think you are focusing on the wrong problem. The real problem of academics is not what people research, the huge elephant in the room is the "publish or die" dogma.
This dogma is one of worst thing happening to research.
It is absurd model for evaluation of people that solves only one problem: how to make evaluation easy for the administrators and soft on researchers. We should rather find and implement a model that leads to best research results possible. I think one such model would be this: give tax money only to people whose results of their last work have proven to be beneficial to society (for other people outside their interest group, not only colleagues in the same field). Impose reasonable set of practical goals and supervision (roadmap) on people who want their work financed and periodically re-evaluate. Leave basic, speculative and other research of unclear significance to be financed privately, by patrons, no tax-based financial support.
I really think you have it backwards on basic and speculative research to lose financing from the public. How would you propose "proving that results are beneficial to society"? And how is this different from the current funding proposal process? Committees that fund proposals certainly look at the success of prior research by the group.
I don't think anyone would disagree with you when you say "We should rather find and implement a model that leads to best research results possible." Viable alternative models are what I am looking for.
Researcher with practical results can provide evidence of usefulness of his results to society and discuss his work and result with his money-guarding superiors who are not researchers themselves. Superiors take some time to confer and decide whether and how much he gets.
Basic research cannot be so easily evaluated, often it is decades, sometimes centuries before the practical use is found, if ever. Basic research, by its definition, has unclear significance for anything except researcher's curiosity and intellectual fulfillment. The results in the form of a paper are often too remote from the needs of society and often so intellectually involved nobody except few people competent in the field can judge whether the work is even meaningful, far from judging its usefulness.
The current evaluation process for basic research is that grant committees don't even try to evaluate the usefulness of the research requestors have done. They use superficial indicators like existing publication score, academic rank and history of the requestors, relation of the work to other high-profile trending topics, association with popular research groups and political considerations.
That's why I think people who want to do basic research should not be funded by their colleagues in field directly from tax money. It's too opaque and ridden with corruption.
This dogma is one of worst thing happening to research.