Taking a different tack from most critics of the Obama administration’s recent contraception mandate and “concession,” Jonah Goldberg writes in the latest National Review about the president’s promise that “preventive services” will be available for free.
[T]here’s the basic, irreducible, fundamental issue: The man is treating us all like idiots.
Because it is a bedrock fact of human existence, never mind economics: There is no free anything. Everything costs time, energy, or matter.
I really thought this was a settled issue. Any sentence that begins “The government will provide for free …” is at best a half-truth, and more often a whole lie. It can be a half-truth if you’re saying that some people will get something “for free” with the caveat that someone else is paying for it. And that someone else is not “the government,” because the government doesn’t pay for anything. Taxpayers — either now or in the future — pay for it all. As Frederic Bastiat once said, “Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.”
“The free-lunch myth,” explained Milton Friedman, is “the belief that somehow or other, government can spend money at nobody’s expense.” You can’t print money to pay for things at no cost without making people poorer, and you can’t tax businesses to avoid paying for things with taxpayer money. Businesses are people, as both Friedman and Mitt Romney have rightly said. When you tax a business, you are taxing the owners, the employees, and the customers of the business.
