That’s true, but does your answer on SO pay the bills for running and serving the content?

Answer my original question first and you have your proof or not. If you can’t answer, there’s your proof.

Yeah, information was freely traded before the advent of capitalism, and you’re still free to walk over to your neighbor’s house and ask questions about your code, but they’re not going to be near the quality of a large scale service like SO.

Where do you expect the resources to come from to have and serve content reliably? They don’t run on hatred of capitalism, they run on money.

Ah yes the same evil capitalism that:

1. Allowed SO to exist in the first place
2. Have market incentive to get anywhere near as good as they once were

Do you have a better system in mind?