As to "freedom to choose my research topics":
How can you justify to yourself to take money from the people at gunpoint to research bitcoin for hundreds of hours? How about researching wasteful spending by tenured professors?
Hint: I am a professor of computer science. Guess where the idea of bitcoin came out of? How can you justify to yourself to take money from the people at gunpoint to research bitcoin for hundreds of hours? How about researching wasteful spending by tenured professors?
And methinks that if I could prevent a few folks here losing their life savings to scammers, Brazilian or otherwise, that may already justify my salary. Which may be more than I deserve, but is not exactly taken at gunpoint from them,