If youâre going to be picky (which I am), âThere Ainât No Such Thing As a Free Lunchâ and âThere Is Such a Thing As a Free Lunchâ are logically equivalent, as the former uses a double negative.
(Yes, Shakespeare used double negatives for emphasis, etc.)
Weâve got a whole topic over in games to quibble over descriptivist vs prescriptivist grammar, if you feel like going hardcore with the pickiness 
Libertarianism is a great ideal until the roads need mowing.
If An âArmed Society is a Polite Societyâ
MLK BLV in the US should be prime real estate.
/Heinlein (love him) but he got a lot of things wrong.
"Technological innovations are the most obvious kind of free lunch. "
How can this make sense? Technical innovations take effort, time, calories. They are not free. The theory of mechanism design also highlights that simply getting more efficient allocations takes effort as well.
Thereâs no such thing as a free lunch. There is such a thing as a mutually beneficial transaction, or reaping the benefits of investing in society. That isnât what the aphorism is denying the existence of (or at least I hope not, because that would be a pretty dumb assertion).
The logical double negation and the ordinary language negation ainât nothing alike.
Adopting the new technology allows us to increase output without using any additional resources.
Since when? We use significantly more resources now as compared to the past. For example: coal, oil. Even if we are talking about tech that makes us more efficient with existing resources, it requires investment.
At this moment, Iâd rather argue against the worry over opportunity costs this way: You canât buy a yacht because of taxes to feed and house the poor? Boo fucking hoo.
Curious if the author is aware of Skypeâs business model.
The original libertarians have that sorted, but they donât believe in capitalism.
âTechnological innovations that allow us to produce a given output with less of every kind of input, including labour, provide us with the classic example of free lunch. Adopting the new technology allows us to increase output without using any additional resources. So, the opportunity cost of the additional output is zero.â
If you are using less resources to get your output, thatâs a good thing, because it means youâre using your resources more efficiently and wasting less. But thereâs still waste and entropy. That never goes to zero, and canât go to less than zero. You canât get something for literally nothing.
If there were no such thing as a free lunch, there would be no humans. We would all die as infants.
As for technological innovation, many benefit who contributed nothing to its development. More generally, many benefit from social organization who did not participate in its origination: language, group experience, law and order, capital formation, science, art, etc. etc. etc. If we had to wait for trade and markets, nothing would ever have occurred.
All this stuff seems so dreadfully obvious, yet one has to point it out over and over again to our Calvinistic libertarians.
There was a shuttered cafe on my college campus that had started out strong but ended up having to close because they couldnât turn a profit.
As you might have already guessed, its name was TANSTAAFL. (I kid you not.)
What about say snail mail vs. email? They both do approximately the same thing, but Iâm almost certain email is going to use fewer natural resources.
9 of 10 True Scotsmen believe: There is such a thing as a free lunch.
Not if you guage the difference by movement of mass, rather than information.
If youâre going to be picky, you should try not to confuse mathematical logic with grammatical logic.
Yeah, Iâve spent time in several societies where pretty much everyone routinely went armed, often openly, and, while you could say a lot of nice things about a couple of them, Iâd never call any of them âpolite.â
IME, in armed societies, rude people usually get away with whatever rudeness doesnât rise to the level of justifying a firefight.
Though in fairness to Heinlein, I think heâs right about this one â he just meant something completely different than what the author of this article means.
The author seems to have redefined âfree lunchâ as âsynergistic or mutually beneficial relationshipâ.
And those do exist, sure enough, but theyâre not what Heinlein was talking.about.
