Speak to any leftist for any length of time, and you'll surely come across concept of the necessity for some good or service to be provided "free" to some segment of the population.
Dig a little deeper, and you'll probably make a remarkable discovery; the aforementioned speaker actually believes that it is indeed free, as if resources somehow fell from the sky as if manna from heaven.
If there is one immutable law of economics it is this: Nothing is free. Not Ever. Somewhere, someone pays for it.
What the collectivist is actually saying is that they want a good or service to be paid for entirely through tax receipts, where the end recipient of the good or service bears no individual cost per unit consumed.
Not only is the acclamation of "free" healthcare or "free" education completely misleading, it is actually almost exactly wrong. Services provided by the government, far from being free, are actually much more expensive than comparable services produced by the private sector.
What the collectivist is actually saying is that they want a good or service to be paid for entirely through tax receipts, where the end recipient of the good or service bears no individual cost per unit consumed.
The great French economist Frederic Bastiat said it best when he said:
Government is that great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everyone else.
Not only is the acclamation of "free" healthcare or "free" education completely misleading, it is actually almost exactly wrong. Services provided by the government, far from being free, are actually much more expensive than comparable services produced by the private sector.
This clip from Thomas Sowell sums it up rather nicely...
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