Wikipedia has an entry headed Final good, which subsumes all kinds of things as goods. For example, the public good and private good are listed as types of goods.

I am in a quandary. I don’t feel like correcting the article, because it is about economics terms and not language. I also feel that people like the Language Log bloggers would see me as a prescriptivist.

But for me, the public good is an abstract, only ever used in the singular, and consumer goods always has an s on the end, and never the twain shall meet. That is, goods is an example of pluralia tantum – nouns that in a particular sense occur only in the plural.

However, there is also a technical meaning of good: a particular article that is produced in order to be sold. So it’s not part of everyday English, but it fits in that article. I’m still not happy with the heading – it’s not a disambiguation article, after all.