Some of you out there may recognize this acronym, coined by Robert Heinlein in his book The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. If you aren't familiar with wither the acronym or the novel, let me translate it for you:
There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.
It is one of the few Universal Truths. It doesn't matter whether you're black, white, yellow, brown, or some other color of the rainbow. Your religious belief has no bearing on it, nor your personal creed. It is a truth that cuts across all lines...except one.
Anyone care to guess which one?
No? Not even a guess? Here's a hint:
Bernie Sanders.
In case you can't figure it out, the only openly communist member of the US Senate, Bernie Sanders, has made the promise of “Free Shit” the cornerstone of his campaign.
I was sitting here, listening to the local news on talk radio (What can I say? The current wip requires talk radio.) when a soundbite had me seriously contemplating tossing the laptop through the window. Someone was explaining why he was going to vote for Bernie Sanders. His main reason was simple. He is a father and he’s going to vote for Bernie so his kids can have a free college education.No one has actually stopped to figure out how all these free things will paid for. After all, someone has to pay for it otherwise the supply of all that Free Shit will will dwindle away and disappear.
At that point, two things happened at once. I stopped — barely — before I grabbed the laptop and tossed it through the window and I wanted to bang my head against the wall. Following close behind those was a voice in my mind chanting “TANSTAAFL! TANSTAAFL!”
You see, that’s the problem I have with a lot of those who are so enamored with Bernie. They love hearing that their taxes will be decreased — or done away with — while those of the “Wall Street speculators” would go up. They love the idea of their children going to college without having to pay tuition. They embrace student loans without interest. What they don’t do is stop long enough to think critically about the promise of free education, even if only for state universities, and whether or not it would really be free.
Hence the chanting of “TANSTAAFL” in my mind.
Of course Bernie has figured out that all he has to do is tax the bejeezus out of all of the Wall Street Speculators. However attractive that sounds, there are two major problems with that solution:
1. No way there will be anywhere near enough revenue collected to pay for it all even if he took every penny from them. Bernie and his fellow Marxists always seem to have a problem with math, being unable to figure out that the outgo to pay for it all will exceed income by a factor of a hundred or more.Sanders, like all dyed-in-the-wool Socialists, assume the people with money will be willing to gladly pay for the government's generosity towards others while impoverishing themselves in the process. As anyone with half a brain knows, they won't. They'll flee the US and take all their money with them, leaving Bernie with no capitalists to steal from. His “Free Shit” experiment will go the way all previous Free Shit experiments – it will fail miserably, leave the economy in a shambles, and create a nation of over 300 million poor people impoverished by the very government who was supposed to give everyone “Free Shit”. The American people will hate him and his fellow Marxists with a passion. What's worse, he won't have a clue why the American people hate him for what he did. After all, he had good intentions...but we all know where that road leads.
2. All those 'greedy' Wall Street Speculators will get around paying those confiscatory and punitive taxes 'owed' to the Sanders Administration by doing one simple thing – moving out of the US and speculating in a different financial market outside the reach of the IRS.
TANSTAAFL, Bernie. TANSTAAFL!
(H/T Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit)