Milton Friedman: There's No Such Thing as a Free Lunch

I don't need to tell you how much we all owe to our honored guests this evening when Milton Friedman came onto the intellectual scene in the 1940s many of his ideas were considered heresy his doctoral dissertation on monopolies in the medical profession was so controversial that it's release was postponed until after the end of World War two his ideas about free markets and monetary policy turned the conventional conventional Keynesian world upside down forever changing the world's macroeconomic landscape dr. Friedman has illuminated the importance of preventing government from manipulating markets he's drafted a whole series of constitutional amendments to limit taxation and government spending to limit debt to limit the money supply tariffs and government interference with market pricing mechanisms now Professor Friedman's views remain very controversial here in Washington indeed the very thought of being unable to manipulate the money supply to win reelection or to impose a tariff or a quota to protect a politically important constituency or to control the price of something is important as oil or healthcare the thought of not being able to do that in flames the White House and Capitol Hill with angry passion but out there in the real America free markets and free men understand dr. Friedman's views by virtue of their clarity and authority many of these ideas have left the world of opinion and entered the rarefied air of fact with the great advantage of being correct this Nobel economist did not need to hedge his bets or cushion his ideas to make them politically fashionable like the great president he inspired instead of catering to the convention wisdom he redefined convention his were the opening shots of the Reagan Revolution and indeed we've seen that they were shots heard around the world except maybe in Little Rock some would like to call his notions conservative but dr. Friedman was neither conserving nor inventing his political philosophy he was rediscovering it reclaiming the lost intellectual heritage of the classical liberals such as Adam Smith and John Locke in this respect he as well as the Cato Institute are profoundly liberal and for rediscovering what it is to be an American and what it is to be free will Milton Friedman the Chicago School he founded in the Cato Institute a great debt the epilogue of dr. Friedman's book money mischief concludes with words spoken on the floor of the French National Assembly in September of 1790 and I quote gentlemen it's a disagreeable custom to which one is too easily led by the harshness of discussions to assume evil intentions it is necessary to be gracious as to intentions one should believe them good but we do not have to be gracious at all to inconsistent logic or absurd reasoning bad logicians have committed more involuntary crimes than bad men have done intentionally close quote the gentleman who spoke those words was a deputy from Namur my great-great great-great-grandfather Pierre Samuel DuPont 203 years later it's very clear that Milton Friedman has exposed more inconsistent logic and absurd reasoning than any person since ladies and gentlemen it is a great honor to present to you the Nobel Prize winner economic trailblazer author scholar statesman champion of political freedom and economic liberty dr. Milton Friedman thank you thank you very much for that you embarrass me it's a great honor for me to be introduced by Pete DuPont who has kept alive that tradition which is great I don't know how many great to the cube 2/4 great to the fourth power grandfather enunciated during the revolution and friends he is one of the few politicians in this country who has consistently stuck to principle that has not modified his principle with one of those butts that everybody has who believes everything you say but and I am delighted also to be here on on the occasion of the establishment of the Cato building since I thought it was inadvisable to build a building but I thought also thought it was inadvisable for them to move out from San Francisco to Washington to move from from Paradise to the evil city but they survived he further they survived the move and have really been remarkable in maintaining themselves as a bastion of principle and not yet having been corrupted by the atmosphere which they breathed every day now they got a little the building as a one great virtue that had got you a little farther away from the most corrupt corrupting aspects of that act atmosphere it is a beautiful building and it's a real tribute to what head crane and his associates have been able to do at Cato so I'm very pleased to be here on this memorable occasion unfortunately also it's only really 639 my time so I don't have to worry that it's late for you people I have sometimes been known as associated with the aphorism there's no such thing as a free lunch which I did not invent I wish there were more attention paid to one that I did invent and that I think is particularly appropriate in this city and that's that nobody spends somebody else's money as carefully as he spends his own but all such aphorisms or half-truths one of our favorite family pursuits as we've driven from one place to the other or done something else that you have to have somebody to keep you is something to keep you occupied with is to try to find the opposites of aphorisms it's not it's not hard for most of them for example consider history never repeats itself and there's nothing new Under the Sun which half do you want to believe or look before you leap but he who hesitates is lost so every aphorisms or almost every aphorism has its opposite and that includes free lunch and the opposite is clear that no such thing as a free lunch the best things in life are free now the best things in life are free that aphorism was in very was invented by a popular songwriter in the middle 20s and the example he gave was love love can come to anyone and the best things in life are free and I'm not sure these days even most people would regard love is a free good but the reason I bring that up is because in the real world in the world of reality in the economic world there is a free lunch there has been a free lunch in extraordinary free lunch and that free lunch has been free markets and private property if you consider what explains why is it that on one side of an arbitrary line there was East Germany before communism fell on the other side there was West Germany what explain why West Germany had such a different level than East Germany it was a free lunch it was the fact that they had a system of largely private markets largely free markets same thing goes for Hong Kong and Mainland China the same thing goes for the development of the United States and of Great Britain and of all Western countries none of us have grown and prospered or very few of us there may be a few examples but very few of us of these episodes of growth and prosperity have derived from some deliberate government messing in and seeing to it that things improve but they've been a free lunch provided by a set of humour of institutions which are invisible which as Friedrich Hayek would always say or a product of human creation but not of human planning not of human intention and now the reason I bring this up now is because it seems to me we in the United States at the moment have a have available to us if we will take it about as close to a thing to a free lunch as you can have it's a funny thing after the fall of communism everybody in the world agreed that socialism was a failure everybody in the world more or less agreed that capitalism was a success in every capitalist country in the world apparently deduced from that that what the West needed was more socialism and it doesn't matter whether you're talking about the United States or you're talking about Germany or you're talking about Britain or any of many another country towards Japan for that matter but let's that's obviously absurd and let's look right now the opportunity that we have to it's closest thing to a free lunch as you can conceive of President Clinton has said as part of his program that what we need is widespread sacrifice and concentrated benefits he doesn't stress as much the fact that there would be concentrated benefits as he does that we absolutely have to have higher taxes and and sacrifice in order to get this so-called deficit under control the fact is that we need exactly the opposite what we need and what we can have and what is the nearest thing to a free lunch is widespread benefits and concentrated sacrifice it's not a wholly free lunch but it's close to it let me give you a few examples the rural electrification administration was established in the 1930s in order to bring electricity to farms when about 80 percent of the farms did not have electricity we now have a hundred percent of the farms have electricity they shift it to telephone service now 100 percent of the farms of telephone service and the rural electrification administration keeps on going Maryland suppose you just abolish the REA all its joy is making making low interest rate loans to concentrate it enters mostly to so-called public utilities the electric telephone companies the people of the United States would be better off they'd save a lot of money that could be used for tax reduction but not only would they be better off who would be heard the handful of people who deserve to be heard they have been living high on the hog they have been getting getting government subsidies at the expense of the rest of the population I call that pretty nearly a free lunch let me give you another example this illustrates Parkinson's law in agriculture in 1945 there were 10 million people employed on farms 10 million both either family or hired workers and the Department of Agriculture had 80,000 employees in 1992 there are 3 million there are 3 million people employed on farms and the Department of Agriculture is 122 thousand employees if we take the part of it that's most specifically agricultural the money that is classified is being spent for the stabilization of farm prices and farm incomes we were spending $1,500 in 92 prices adjusted for inflation we were spending $1,500 per person employed in 1950 and $5,500 in 1990 now supposed to we just abolished that program completely most consumers in the United States would benefit food would be cheaper they'd be less key of their tax money going to encourage farmers to produce goods to be stored in warehouses to be destroyed and given away isn't that almost a free lunch not even the farmers who get these mother these monies now would really be as badly off as they think they would be because most of the money they get they just spend on producing things they shouldn't be producing buying fertilizer they shouldn't be fertilizing and so on down the line so we have a free lunch there and you can keep on going there's hardly an item in the budget which does not offer such an opportunity it is said what the Liberals will tell you about this what the Clinton people will tell you is that while all those things are there because if people want the goodies but they're just too stingy to pay for that's utter nonsense the people don't want these goodies suppose you put up to a referendum of the American people a simple proposition you buy sugar and you have two choices we can set up things so you buy sugar that is produced out of beets a beech growing on American farms and chain sugar and American farms and so on or you can get the sugar from El Salvador Philippines or somewhere else now of course if you insist on having homegrown cocoa sugar it'll be twice as expensive or three times as expensive as if you have sugar from abroad suppose you had a referendum on that do you think you'd get an overwhelming vote to have the higher price sugar and not the lower price sugar nonsense the people don't want that a very small group of special interest the selected group that concentrated benefit group wanted and the people never hear from it the people never have a chance to express their vote their will we are not governed by the people that's a myth that carries over from Abraham Lincoln's day we don't have government of the people by the people for the people we have government of the people by the bureaucrats for the bureaucrats again let me take another myth President Clinton says that he's the agent of change and without asking what kind of change and whether there's good chance or bad change but leave that aside for a moment that simply is in the economic area for the moment that's false and the reason why he gets away with it is because of the great mistake of talking about the twelve Reagan Bush years as if they were one period they weren't you had Reaganomics Bush Atomics and now clintonomics Reaganomics had four simple principles lower marginal tax rates deregulate regulation restrained government spending monetary policy devoted to stable prices non inflationary monetary policy while Reagan did not achieve all of those he made good progress on them as you all know what was Bush's policy it was exactly the opposite as judged from what happened higher tax rates more regulation increased government spending so that was a reverse now what is Clinton's policy higher tax rates more regulation more government spending so far from being an agent of change Clinton's economic problems is Bush anomic suite large he is a true proper successor of mr. Bush we know what the results of the reverse Reaganomics would I hope we don't see the results of Bush Atomics writ large on a more fundamental level if we get below this immediate surface our present problems both economic and non-economic the rise mainly from the drastic change that has occurred in my lifetime but in the lifetime of many you hear about the relative importance of two markets to different markets for determining who gets what when where and how we have two such markets we have the economic market operating under the incentive of profit and we have the political market operating under the incentive of power and what has happened in my lifetime was it the relative importance of the of the economic market has declined in terms of the fraction of the country's resources that it is able to use and the importance of the government market of the political market has greatly expanded to summarize but I want to go but go on in a little greater length but say in advance what we have been doing in my lifetime is to be starving the market that has been working and to be feeding the market that has been failing and that's essentially the story of the last 15 60 years the world was very different when Rose and I were growing up we are in the process of trying to write our memoirs and that has led us to go back and think and read lay of our youth and we are struck enormous ly by how different the world is we are far wealthier today than we were then but we are less free and we are less secure economically we've done enormous ly well in terms of the kind of society we live in we've done very very badly let me suggest let me show the different what's happened to the relative importance of these two markets I graduated from high school in 1928 a long long time ago when I graduated from high school total government spending in the United States at all levels federal state and local was a little over ten percent of the national income about eleven twelve percent of the national income two thirds of that was local federal government spending was about three percent of the national income and that's roughly what it had been since the Constitution was adopted a century and a half earlier except for periods of major war half of that went for the Army and Navy local government spending was something like seven eight nine local satan' local and half of that was going for schools and roads now today total government spending at all levels is 43% of the national income and two-thirds of that is federal one-third state and local the federal portion is 30 percent of national income about or ten times as much as it was when I was graduated from high school and the end that statement that that figure under states the fraction of the resources is being absorbed by the political market because in addition to government spending government mandates a great many expenditures on all of us which government never used to do from the simple thing of having an T people who have it requiring you to pay for an T to pollution devices on your automobiles to the clean air bill to thee aid for disability you can go down the lawn if you add in the costs imposed on the private economy that essentially the private economy is an agent of the federal government everybody in this room was working for the federal government about a month ago filling out income tax returns why shouldn't you have gotten paid for being tax collectors for the federal government but that's your use of your resources so I would say that at least 50% of the total resources of our nation total productive resources are now being organized through the political market in that sense in a very important sense we are more than half socialist so much for the input what about the output consider the private market first and there has been an absolutely tremendous increase in our living standards almost entirely due to the private market I had a gentleman whom I don't really know but by the name of EB Li graduated from the Harvard class of 1934 and at the 55th reunion of Harvard in 1989 he read a little piece about entitled as we were I want to read that part of it which deals with the physical conditions because it brings it out better than I can any other way and here's what he wrote we were before frozen foods computers radars credit cards and ballpoint pens for us time sharing meant togetherness a chip was a piece of wood hardware meant hammer and nails and software was what you slept in during the hot weather we were also before ice makers dishwashers clothes dryers electric blankets and disposable diapers when we were in college it was a privilege to go Pizza Cheerios frozen orange juice and instant coffee were unheard of aides were act of charity or breath mints in our day grass was mowed smoking was fashionable pot was something you cooked in and fast food was what you ate during Lent farmers farmers and businessmen took risks without thought of going to the government for help and I cannot resist quoting from a non-economic part of his poem he went onto non-economic part but I just want to quote one sentence we were probably the last generation to think a girl needed a husband to have a baby we were young and gay speaking for myself I would say that radio was in its early stages television was a futuristic dream airplanes were all propeller driven a trip to New York from where my family lived 20 miles away in New Jersey was a great event and I never was west of the Delaware River until I went to graduate school at the age of 20 truly a revolution has occurred in our material standard of living and a revolution that has occurred almost entirely through the private economic market government contribution was essential but not costly its contribution which it's not making nearly as well as it did in an earlier time was to protect private property rights to provide a mechanism for adjudicating disputes beyond that you have to recognize that there were some spin-offs from war term research wartime research that private industry was able to use but certainly the overwhelming bulk of what I've described as a revolution in our standard of life came entirely through the private market now in sharp contrast look at what the output of real results of the greatly expanded role of government has produced whereas the private market produced a higher standard of living the expanded government market produced many problems again the contrast is sharp if I may make it that way in our own personal experience both rose and I came from families with very low incomes incomes that by today's standards would be well below the poverty the so-called poverty line but we both went to government schools we both thought we got a good education families in our condition in our Letarte families today who had an income corresponding to what we had then would belie would likely be much less fortunate their children would have a much harder time getting a decent education has children we were able to walk to school and we weren't afraid of being mugged and we can walk in the streets almost everywhere an interesting contrast is that in the depths of the depression in 1930s when the number of truly disadvantages advantaged people people in great trouble was far greater than it was today that it is today there was nothing like the current concern over personal save it safely and there were very few homeless beggars littering the streets what you had on the streets were people trying to sell apples there was a sense of self-reliance at that time which is if it hasn't disappeared it's much less prevalent in 1934 I was a graduate student of Columbia University and we thought nothing of walking across Morningside Park down to Harlem and going to the going to the entertainment places in Harlem there was no the subways were safe they weren't they weren't there was no graffiti there was no danger of being mugged it was a different world moreover you could even find an apartment to rent when we moved to New York after we got married and moved to New York in 1938 to get an apartment we looked in the in the apartments available column of the newspapers took a half a dozen we want to look at looked at them rented one people used to give up their apartments in the summer and the spring go away for the summer and come back in the autumn to find a new apartment it was called a moving season now New York today the probably the best way to find an apartment is to keep track of the obituary columns what's produced that difference why is the New York housing a disaster today why does the North Bronx look like it's like parts of Bosnia that have been bombed there's no question it's not because of the private market is because of rent control is because of government activity again when we moved to Washington in 1941 it had a population of 700,000 the metropolitan area had a population that perhaps a million today Washington DC has a population of 600,000 and the metropolitan area four million almost all making a living out of spending other people's money and are they spending it very carefully despite the current rhetoric despite all the emphasis today on the economic problem that's not our real problem we are a very prosperous country our economic problems are rather minor at the moment the economy is basically very strong amazingly strong it is really a miracle really a tribute to the strength of what private markets and free enterprise can do that with fewer than half the total resources of the country our private enterprise system can produce a higher standard of living in the world the standard of living at the enemy of that's the envy of everybody around the world our real problems are not economic let me give you one example of why even in this area as I say I'm inclined to say our real problems are not economic despite the best efforts of government to make himself I want to cite one figure in 1946 government assumed the responsibility for producing full employment we passed the full Employment Act in the years since then average unemployment has averaged 5.7 percent in the years 1929 when government didn't make any pretense of having anything to do with unemployment unemployment averaged 4.6 percent so our unemployment problem too is largely a government created problem but nonetheless the economic problems are not the real problems our major problems are social deteriorating education lawlessness and crime homelessness which is a misnomer there's the littering of the streets with mental problem of people who are mentally ill for who are beggars or loiterers not lawyers No I said loiterers I may say that in 1933 or fourth the depth of the depression you couldn't walk down a street and find somebody as we do in San Francisco all the time who was sitting there with a sign please contribute so I can get a shot for my cat in any rate the collapse of family values the crisis in medical care teenage pregnancies every single one of these have all been either produced by or exacerbated by the well-intentioned efforts of government I don't need to demonstrate that to the your Cato audience charles murray who's in the audience his book losing ground is really persuasive evidence of the extent to which this is a government responsibility and with respect to most of the others the so-called homelessness on the street largely a result of the emptying of the mental institutions by a philosophy of liberation and so on i think it's easy to document two things that we've been transferring resources from the private market to the government market and second that the private market works in the government market doesn't what's hard to do much harder is to understand why we've done that why is it that supposedly intelligent people well-intentioned people have produced results like that one of the answers we all used to give in our ok off attempted to given which is certainly part of the answer is a power of special interest the fact that the 3% of the population who are in agriculture are widely distributed among some key states and therefore they get a political power out of all proportion to their influence you have the you have the people who come to urge tariffs the customers will be hurt don't come and testify against him they don't know they would be hurt and moreover each one would be hurt a little it doesn't pay him to go and testify and so on that argument has been made many times and we're all aware of the power of special interest but I think there's a much more fundamental answer which is more extensive more basic and that has to do with the difference between the self-interest of individuals when they are engaged in the private market and the self-interest of individuals when they are engaged in the government sector if you're engaged in the venture in the private market and you undertake a project and it is a failure the only way you can keep it going is to dig into your own pocket and so you have a strong incentive to shut it down on the other hand suppose you start exactly the same enterprise in the government sector with exactly the same prospects of success or failure and if it then fails you have a much better alternative you can always say oh we all we know this really we really should have done this on a bigger scale it wasn't on a big enough scale and you don't have to dig into your own pocket you have a much deeper pocket to dig in they move out of the taxpayer and in perfectly good conscience not being dishonest or anything you can try to persuade and typically succeed in persuading the not the taxpayer but the congressmen who are in charge of the taxpayers purse that this is really a good project and all it needs is a little bit more money and so to coin different another aphorism if a private venture fails is closed down if a government venture fails it's expanded and I challenge you to find any exception we sometimes think that the problem is to elect the right people to the Congress I think that's false you won't believe me but I believe myself when I say that if a random sample of the people in this room where to go where to replace to 435 people in the Congress and 100 people in the Senate the results would be just the same you're all principled that would include me - I'm not leaving myself out of that because where people stand dependent where people stand depend on where they sit it's an old old aphorism and it's true and the people in the win the Congress in the Senate are fine decent people they want to do good it isn't that they're deliberately engaging in activities that they know will do harm it is that they are immersed in an environment in which all the pressures are in one direction and one direction only there are a few exceptions Dick Armey his one and there are a number of others but people don't do bad things for bad motives everybody does things for good motives but here the Congress are besieged day by day with people urging them to do good and it's very hard for them to avoid that and what you find and there have been some recent studies that demonstrate that is that most of the pressure for more spending comes from the government itself it's a self-generating monstrosity and the only way in my opinion you will change it is by changing the incentives that the people in Congress have under which they operate changing what is in their self-interest to do same way in the private market if you want people are act differently you have to make it in their own self-interest act that way as Army option always says there's one thing you can count on everybody in the world to do and that's to put his self-interest above yours I have no unfortunately panacea for changing the self-interest of the people the constitutional amendments that Pete referred to would be fine that's fine I'm all in favor of them but you're not going to get them there's no mechanism whereby you're at the moment going to be able to achieve anything like that the only thing on the horizon is Howie Rich's pet scheme and others of us the term limits movement a six-year term limit for Representatives which changed drastically the incentives under which they operate I'm afraid we'd lose dick but we'd gain even more not in the way better people don't misunderstand me but in the way of a change in the incentives under which people operate but I think that those of us who are interested in trying to see to it that we reverse the micellar the allocation of our resources that we shift more and more of our resources to the private market and reduce and have less and less resources in the government market must turn our attention away from the immediate sort of direct action of electing the right people and one point we thought electing the right president would do it we did it and it didn't so we have to turn our attention to how can we change the incentives under which people operate term limits is one movement and it's an exact excellent movement and it's making real progress there have to be but there have to be other movements some of it is being done now on the state level wherever you have initiatives referenda you have an opportunity to change on the whole I think that the pure democracy in that sense I don't believe in democracy nobody believes in democracy nobody believes that a 51% of the people vote to kill the other 49% that's appropriate and pure majoritarian rule would say it is but what we do believe is in giving everybody the opportunity to use his own resources as effectively as he can to promote his own value so long as he doesn't interfere with anybody else and by and on the large experience has shown that the public at large through the initiative process he's much more attuned to that objective than are the people they elect to the legislature so I think the referendum process has to be exploited term limits is one in California we have working very hard on a initiative to get for parental choice in schools effective parental choice which will be on the ballot in 1994 maybe we can't we won't win but we've got to try at any rate that's the world that Cato is trying to dilute to and it's trying to contribute to it in many different ways by documenting these points I've just swept over and broad generalities about the way in which these government programs are doing harm about the unintended consequences of these well-meaning programs that's one way and that will wake the public at large up it's got to bring we've got to bring home to the public at large that they are being taken to the cleaners that it isn't true that these government spending is for the goodies they want it's not that at all and as they become aware of that as public opinion changes you will eventually maybe we'll be able to get more institutional changes which will establish the appropriate incentives let me close by telling one more story that your Hyatt business reminds me of this has to do with what changed Britain when Thatcher came in the one person who had more to do without than any other in fact is a person most you never heard of though some of you here surely did Antony Fisher Andy Fisher was a was a was a fun was an air air air fighter a fighter in the Air Force fighter pilot in the Air Force during World War two who somehow or other got happened to get hold of Friedrich Hayek's book Road to Serfdom in 1944 just after it came out who was persuaded by it and decided after the war that he wanted to do something that would promote a free society and so he went to see Fritz Hayek at the London School of Economics and he told him he was thinking of getting elected to Parliament in order to try to influence matters and Fritz told him it won't do any good getting elected to Parliament you'll just be one vote there you'll be like all the rest you won't get a real change unless you change the thinking of the intellectual community in the in Britain that's what you've got to do so and the Buitoni went away and he started business he looked or he wanted to go into agriculture in some way and he wanted to find an agricultural enterprise that government didn't control and the only thing he could find that government wasn't controlling was chickens as it happens there was a revolution in the production of chickens in the United States at that time he came over the United States learned about that went back and started it in in Britain and was an enormous success he finally built up a large public company that was sold but with some of his first earnings he started the Institute of Economic Affairs a free-market think-tank in London he hired it Ralph Harris now Lord Harris Arthur Selden now sir yourself to run it and the Institute of Economic Affairs in turn changed the intellectual climate of Britain change the attitudes and values of Margaret Thatcher and without the Institute of Economic Affairs you never would have had the Thatcher Revolution that's a good example for Cato what a think-tank can under the best of circumstances accomplish thank you very much Thank You Milton I want to thank Rose Friedman and Milton Friedman for making a special effort to come out from their beloved San Francisco to City that's not their favorite to join us this evening let me just make a personal note and that is that everyone agrees Nobel Friedman is a great economist but there can be debate over which academic has been the most important economist of the 20th century I do not think however that there's any debate over which academic has done more to inspire people around the world and to promote the ideas of Liberty around the world and that person is Milton Friedman you

Channel: Libertarianism.org

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Keywords: libertarian, libertarianism, libertarianismdotorg, philosophy, politics, milton friedman, chicago school, catoinstitutevideo, cato, cato institute, TANSTAAFL, no such thing as a free lunch

Id: 77fdRWpV_-4

Length: 49min 38sec (2978 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 08 2013

Reddit Comments

[u/elsbot]

If there is a racist Target, there will be a nonracist Target that springs up to take all its profits from people who don't want to shop at racist Target. You think you can force people to be just like you, and you can't.

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[u/aksack]

I am not watching it. Does it appeal to a 13 year-old, but completely fail in the real world, and lead to significantly worse outcomes?

[u/Zen_Pickle]

I'm not the best at political philosophy but every time I visit my parents my mom cooks something delicious for free. So how does that work?

[u/[deleted]]

Of course there is! Hire a social worker at $30k - if they prevent ONE person from offending and hence going to maximum security in a year society has a net benefit to the tune of $20k.

Libertarian/Ancap stuff only works if you totally ignore the existence of externalities and game theory.

[u/AnCom9]

"There's No Such Thing as a Free Lunch"

Haven't looked at the video yet, but let me guess. Does he go something like: "Oh, there's no such thing as a free lunch because there always first has to be someone else that buys it for you." like what libertarians usually say in regards to free healthcare?