“No, this is not one of those pathetic jokes, such as that what babies and soccer players have in common is that they dribble. What they have in common is unfortunately no joke. They are policy proposals with protagonists who believe in “free lunches”, who live in fantasy worlds with cost-free benefits. But TANSTAAFL. That is the acronym for “there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch”. Everyone who internalises and applies the concept deserves a #liesmustfall doctorate.
In the fantasy-free lunch world, governments confer cost-free blessings on subjects. And subjects they are, subjected to stifling controls and taxes at the expense of liberty and prosperity”.
Repeat after me: there are no free lunches: Leon Louw, executive director of the Free Market Foundation, on 28 September 2016 in BDlive published by Business Day.
Further excerpts
Our Treasury ought, above all, to be cost-conscious, yet it has the temerity to tell Parliament that one of the costliest proposals imaginable, “twin peaks” restructuring of the financial system, will cost nothing. When forced to produce an impact assessment, the Treasury confessed to some cost, which it misrepresented as a tiny fraction of real cost and as easily financed by a trivial business levy.
The denied truth is that the real cost will be multiples of confessed cost. Consumers, not business, will bear the full cost of a monstrous new bureaucracy, hence business acquiescence.
. . . .
Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi and his supposedly autonomous health policy propagandists, say stifling controls, taxes and prohibitions incur no costs because supposedly unhealthy choices “have no benefits”. They do not regard job losses, small business impacts, higher prices, curtailed availability or prohibited information as costs. For them, less satisfaction, happiness, pleasure, leisure and lifestyle liberty are not costs.
TANSTAAFL denialism is puzzling only in the absence of realising that people who allocate their own resources to themselves worry about cost and quality; people who allocate their own resources to others worry about cost not quality; people who allocate someone else’s resources to themselves worry about quality not cost; and people who allocate someone else’s resources to someone else worry about neither cost nor quality. Advocates of policies under consideration are conspicuously in the last two groups.