Free College Is Too Expensive

There’s a reason why old clichés tend to hang around for decades. The reason is they’re based on fact.

Example: “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” When someone says that a critically-important product or service is “free,” it isn’t. Everything costs money. Everyone who performs a service or delivers a product gets paid, as well they should. The only question is, by whom?

A popular recent theme is free college, which joins free preschool and free healthcare as the latest thing they say we’re “entitled” to for free, that we “deserve.”

Everything provided by other people costs money, in the form of salaries, rent, transportation, etc. -- every aspect of a delivered product or service is paid for by someone. If the government is going to provide something to the population for “free,” then the Government has to raise the funds to do so, by collecting taxes. The government has no “money;” it’s not like there is some big bank account that the government can tap when they need something extra and just write a check the way you do to cover rent or a car repair or a new refrigerator.

Quite the opposite: not only doesn’t the government have any money, it’s always spending money it doesn’t have. It’s like continually charging on a credit card where the credit limit is always raised and the card never gets refused. The continually-rising unpaid principle is our national debt, not to be confused with the annual deficit, which may shrink from time to time. (The government -- regardless which party is in power -- knows that the vast majority of people don’t know the difference between the national debt and the annual deficit, so they tout periodic deficit reductions as being accomplishments of great import, knowing that most people will interpret that as a major debt reduction, and thus feel that “all this confusing talk about ‘the money our children will have to pay back tomorrow’ is overblown” and taken care of.)

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Articles: Free College Is Too Expensive