> This cost is negligible as well. The cost is merely the cost of providing hunting/fishing levels of food, and it is only owed to the small subset of people who would be better off as hunters. We're talking about $1-5/day here.
Only if you use an artificially narrow definition of "better off." Would you rather be a hunter/gatherer in a world of hunter/gatherers, or a hunter/gatherer in the modern world? If you consider only the value of food, the two are fungible. But if you consider the whole range of things people attach value to (social interaction, etc), the former is far preferable. This is a false objectivity that is common with approaches like yours. Just because certain sources of value are "fuzzy" does not mean they are objectively valued at zero. Also, you're ignoring all the modern findings of behavioral economics that notes that people perceive value relatively. Acknowledging that fact, simply paying for hunting/fishing levels of food does not put people in the same position as they would be otherwise.
> In addition to your wildly incorrect accounting, you seem confused as to what a public good is. Education is a private good, being rivalrous and excludible.
Sorry, I was imprecise. I meant to say that education generates large positive externalities. Though I should point out in my defense that it is not uncommon to use "public good" to refer to something that generates large positive externalities but does not meet the technical definition of public good...
> You again cite a tiny fraction of what is provided (literacy + numeracy) while ignoring the vast majority of spending (most of high school and college).
The point is that when someone gets an education, they are not the only nor even the primary beneficiaries of that education. When I buy and eat a cookie, only I enjoy that cookie. When I get an education, the marginal increase in my economic value is split between me and my employer. In many companies, the employer benefits more from the education than you do. One need only look to see how employers flock to areas with top-tier engineering schools (the Bay Area, the Research Triangle, Atlanta, Austin, etc) to see how much employers benefit from public education.
