Free Ride

Why nothing comes for free:

Why can’t the government just give people whatever they want for free? Now, you might say, “Well, wait. Can’t they just print money?” Yes, they can. However – I don’t want to spend multiple paragraphs talking about monetary theory here, so I am going to keep this simple – dollars are not “value.” Dollars are just a representation of value. If you increase the supply of dollars without increasing the actual value of the things the dollar represents, you lessen the value of the dollars and you get inflation. That’s exactly what happened during COVID and it’s why everyone is complaining about how much eggs, rent, and cars cost today compared to what they did 5 years ago. So, just printing large amounts of money ends up being counterproductive. Ultimately, the same could be said of borrowing money. When the government borrows money, that money needs to be paid back with interest. For a business, that can often make sense. If a business takes a million-dollar loan to buy a piece of equipment that allows them to create 10 million dollars worth of value, they can afford to pay the loan back with interest and have plenty of money left over. Very rarely do the government’s loans pay off in that fashion and taking them out to give people things for “free” is just a loss. We’re already 36 TRILLION dollars in debt and we paid 882 billion in interest alone in just 2024 as a result of doing that. We also cannot forget that saying, “The government is giving you this for free” is another way of saying, “The government is giving you something paid for by taxpayers.” That’s who ultimately funds the government. You. Me. Everyone who pays taxes.

It's never free to those who are paying for it...