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Do you mean that people do benefit personally from having fair courts and roads? The key question to if something should be state funded is not "is it beneficial," to be funded by tax dollars something should be a public good, as in non-excludable and non-rivalrous. Generaly the courts are supposed to be designed this way. Roads on the other-had depend on the type of road. Roads can be excludable, see toll roads. Probably most interstate and express roads should be paid by user fees that full capture the externalities of those roads. So some set of roads are both beneficial and monetizable. They can "make doallars."
Knowledge as derived from fundamental research can be non-excludable and non-rivalrous, but some not-insubstantial fraction of useful knowledge is excludable.
This can be done in two ways. First, you can patent some knowledge. Much of the development of GLP-1 agonists from Gila monster venom was funded by Amylin Pharmaceuticals, Eli Lilly, etc. If the drug companies are going to be granted a monopoly on the beneficial results of this type of research they ought to pay for all of this class of research. It makes no sense for the tax payer to pay for the research and then grant a pharmaceutical company the exclusive rights to capture all the benefits of the research.
Second, you can keep knowledge as a trade secret. If @Jesweez research actually has "...direct relevance for fire risk forecasting..." then the actuarial teams at the insurance companies should be willing to pay him for it. If it's not something that can actually be incorporated into a risk model then it does not actually have "direct relevance," it has some sort of hypothetical indirect potential relevance. Alternatively, if it can actually give you an edge understanding where drought is affecting most, you should be able to sell it to a hedge fund trading agricultural futures. Or an industry consortium or publication in the vein of the some sort of new Old Farmer's Almanac.
There is probably some small set of research that is useful, novel, can't be patented, and can't be sold as a proprietary model. It is a vanishingly small fraction of total federal research funding though.
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