Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Emma_Goldman 2841 days ago
The point is that a sufficiently large part of the value of education is a non-excludable public good - i.e. it has huge collective benefits for society as a whole - that if you privatised the education system it would be extremely injurious to everyone. Of course, education also gives people, if you want to use that language, a certain amount of 'human capital' which tends towards a higher earning potential. But it is because so much of the value of education is a public good that it's misvalued, and necessarily so under capitalism.

Also: "If someone is doing something of value without profiting personally, the next question about that activity is "what info am I missing about how they profit?".

As someone else mentioned, this is frighteningly sociopathic. But it's also ideologically blinkered. It's an elementary fact of anthropology that human societies for most of history have lived on a communal basis without property. People act from personal profit because of the structure and cultural sediment of capitalism, not because humans are inherently selfish.

1 comments

> It's an elementary fact of anthropology that human societies for most of history have lived on a communal basis without property.

Interesting. I've assumed that primitive communities were run from the top down with the alpha male effectively owning everything.

I found this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitive_communism

But it states:

> There is also no agreement among later scholars, including Marxists, on the historical extent, or longevity, of primitive communism.