Silly me. I had assumed that John he was accepting the standard definitions of public goods, externalities, and optimality found in the economics literature. After all these are economic concepts which have all found their origins in economic research. I guess UNC J school teaches their own version. Furthermore, I had invited John on several occasions to state that he was rejecting the standard theory and to present an alternative–and possibly win a Nobel Prize for it. Until now he never did. If he had, it certainly would have saved us a lot of time. After all of this we now find out that we were arguing about apples and oranges all along. Well, I’m going to stick with apples, at least until John’s new oranges theory of optimality, that all “fair minded” readers should understand (to paraphrase John from a recent NC Spin, I guess we on this side are “unfair minded”) catches on and displaces the standard theory.