Why does yahoo take away 5 points to ask a question?

If you choose a best answer after 4 hours and less than 4 days from posting the question you get a refund of 3 points so then you are only 2 points out of pocket. If you answer a question you get 2 points.

There has to be some incentive to answer questions because questions and no answers would cause the whole system to collapse.

Asking a question costs 5 points to to encourage participating and answering more than asking question. If people don't lose points asking, then there will be lots of spamming and flooding with silly and obscene stuff (a lot more than there is now) and no one would come to answer.

Cheers

So they encourage people to ask less and answer more. I mean if they gave points to people who asked questions, then everybody would be asking and no one would be answering.

its to stop people from flooding the site with spam/dumb questions.