>An underlying premise of Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange is that there’s tremendous amounts of knowledge tied up in “ordinary” people, and given an easy way to show it off and a little incentive they can make this knowledge available and help as many people as possible.

That is the underlying premise of free market economics and small-government conservatism, too. Go read some Thomas Sowell, a lot of his books discuss the issue, especially A Conflict of Values and, in more detail, Knowledge and Decisions.