Ahhh-- but our government also protects intellectual property, NATIONAL intellectual property, etc.

We also have a federal government to regulate trade and commerce. Yes?

Few people, even hard-core free-market folks, would want our government to step completely out of the business of those two line items in its mandate.

An educated native (non-foreign) populace is essential to those activities, because foreign work-visas do not allow for some work which there is national interest in keeping, well, proprietary.

If we don't really HAVE enough people to do that work, then we risk losing competitive advantage internationally as we lack the means to prevent the dissemination of that information.

An educated populace is also necessary to run a democratic republic, and while the level of that education is certainly open to debate, the necessity of critically thinking and fully literate adults most certainly is not.

When fully 1/3rd of American adults can't embrace basic science I have to presume that this is a function of scientific illiteracy on a breathtaking scale. There are similar examples across many different domains, it's not just STEM.

So while I agree with the personal benefit/personal responsibility mandate to some extent (people tend to devalue what they are given for free), I do disagree that education doesn't produce "benefits" for society as a whole.

The scientific funding that happened during the period 1940-1970 has produced the tech industry-- and to no small extent, the biotech industry-- that powers so much of our economy today. That funding went largely into higher education, national defense/laboratories, and the space program.

It has also been argued that the GI Bill, which educated a generation of veterans (and in LARGE, large numbers) produced a similar economic power-boost.

Without a control group to compare with, I don't know how valid it is to assign causation. But it certainly seems reasonable.

Schrödinger's cat walks into a bar. And doesn't.