Those aren’t the only option. My main problem with people’s use of money is that it tends to be atomistic, and encourage personal problems. Thus, the question for most would really be “free for whom?”. Logically, it is quite easy to posit transactions which are undertaken to be free for someone else, but this gets outside of the “game” which many find implicit in such transactions. Such as even a simple gift economy. If you’re a stranger, and I somehow give you a gift, then it was free. Free for you, but not necessarily for me.
I think of economics as more like water. It cycles, changes forms, and moves from place to place. But the “transactional” model of it tends to be too localized and quite limited.
But this itself is based upon a particular set of assumptions, rather than anything universal. Basically that: “The money has got to come from somewhere.” Why does it? Because somebody else down the chain says so. And ad infinitum. It’s a colossal circle-jerk.
Free doesn’t only refer to money. Money is “made” by trading time and effort for it (working). If something costs time, effort, raw materials, etc. then it’s not free, even if no money changes hands.
You can see it this way, but it is just one of many possible philosophies. It has a lot of traction because many seem to be “invested” in it. I think it isn’t accurate. For example, in a goal-based system, your “payment” is that you succeeded in realizing what you decided to do. Being bribed or compensated is beside the point. My point was not whether or not money changes hands, but rather that things are not, in actuality, “transactional”.
Suppose you and a bunch of your friends get together for a game. (And between you, you have everything required.) Yes, you’re trading time and effort, for the fun time and effort. No, we can’t expand that to the entire economy yet.
This defines the game, more or less. But does not account for the specifics. Perhaps the restaurant fails to make a profit anyway. Or perhaps they do, but I brought my own drinks. If I brought drinks, and eat their free food, then the meal was free for me. But this is also why I think transactional games are not very clever, because they start from the logical conclusions that profit is desirable, compensation is possible, that it matters if money is in your pocket versus somebody elses - and from here work backwards to explain “rational” interests in terms of a self-interest which is not based upon reason, but instinct.
Although here, they are probably still taking that money as taxes whether they give anything back or not.
We might be taking the metaphysics of both “cost” and “externalization” for granted here. What is internal or external to a given set depends upon where one places the boundaries.
Am I? What do I provide them with? Your statement appears to be based upon the presumption that despite not paying Facebook, that I choose to have some affiliation with them, that I use their services. It also seems to assume that every user participates with the same terms of service, which may or not be the case.
If you think your lunch is free because you brought your drink into the building (from where? how did you get it?) instead of buying it at that moment in that restaurant, then you do not understand the concept.
You are reminding me of a story I read in grade school in which a classroom tries to understand why counting was developed in a practical way, by functioning for a week without it. So when time came to order milk for the daily snack, for example, the kids assigned to that task had to remember the names of everyone in the class and then grab the right number of milk cartons by going name by name: this is for Suzy, this is for Andy, this is for…
Numbers – and by extension, money – are excellent placeholders for humans to engage in transactions that involve more than immediate gratification for an individual or at most a small group. It’s one of our most basic and most crucial inventions, and should be respected as such.
I deleted my comment because TFA covers a lot of it, while the summary doesn’t seem to. The main idea was the same, that TANSTAAFL only applies to fully efficient markets and doesn’t cover many real-world examples.
The point is that unless some savings are made, you pay somehow or someone else pays. I suppose you could drink a litre of water just before entering the restaurant and not order any drinks (or eat at a casino and not gamble, provide false information on Facebook or sample goods at a store before buying them on Amazon), then you personally eat for free (and the company or other customers pay). If that happens too much, the company has to change its business model or go out of business. In any case, a ‘free lunch’ can’t be the same as a ‘net benefit for both parties’ - if that wasn’t the case anyway, people would never go out to eat or restaurants would never open.
It seems to me that in order to have the benefits of living in a larger society where you aren’t expected to provide for all of your own needs, there needs to be some way to compensate people you don’t know for benefits that they provide. There are many ways in which I provide and receive benefits without money being involved and there are ways to make this more common on a societal level, but money seems to be a fairly good way of abstracting benefit in many cases.
If the government just appropriated the money, this would be very inefficient and hopefully the voters would have something to say about that. If they didn’t care, there’s no reason why the government would give the money out as welfare rather than pocketing it or using it for something that benefited them more.
All I’m saying is that they’re not eliminating the cost, just making sure that they aren’t the ones to pay it. If a government waives taxes for a company to encourage them to relocate there, they may be hoping for the free lunch effect (more jobs and investment in the community, for example), but the opportunity costs could include failed businesses in the area, lost taxes for that community or any others that would have hosted the company if that deal hadn’t been offered, poorer working conditions, environmental damage etc. Even if the costs are mainly being borne by people who don’t have a say, they’re still real.
People’s information and eyeballs seem to be pretty valuable - they made almost $12.5 billion last year, mainly from advertising.
It’s backwards reasoning to start from the axiom that there must be costs. Whether or not here may be depends upon how one chooses to model social activity.
From basic critical principle, I think it’s useful to be skeptical of any claims of anything in life being universal. There are some easy tests which can be tried, although most never bother. The easiest and most telling one tends to be my “anthropomorphism” test. If whatever seems to be universally true only applies to humans, then it is in no way universal. My next one is my “organism” test. If it is true only for living things, this is not universal either.
This is precisely where money fails. It simply flows from one place to another, it doesn’t matter who pays it, or who gets it. This can happen more or less automatically without people needing to make personal problems out of it.
Money made by living in the past probably won’t help them much.
I was hoping to reply to the other half of your post later, but it disappeared! I enjoyed the first half, anyway.
I understand the concept, but my point was that what really defines it for most people is not whether it was free or costly, but rather, for whom.
I strongly disagree that money is an extension of mathematics. Mathematics is systematic, with no values implicit but its own functional processes. Whereas the use of money seems to generally be predicated upon playing games based entirely upon wishful thinking. This has often been my working definition of finance: math + wishful thinking. Counting and measurement are crucial practices, but when made subservient to money they are deliberately used for obfuscation. Not to establish accurate measures of the value of commodities or services, but to deceive about these values. Which strikes me as self-aggrandizing and antisocial. And as a means of resource management, economics have generally been rather ineffective.
A more pressing bit of analysis might be the introspection of asking: “Why/how does it matter whether the lunch is free or not?”
i find this interesting because the goal posts in these sorts of conversations moves so very quickly.
if we say “payment” is equivalent to “exchange”, then yes: universally, nothing is free, because entropy increases with every exchange.
payment however is a human construction, where exchange is not.
i pay money to a third party to buy my friend a lunch. that lunch is factually free… for my friend.
someone has paid, however, so arguably it is not free overall. also someone might also argue that my friend has given up valuable opportunity costs, because they could have used that time to earn money.
on the other hand, that lunch is also literally invaluable. the time and experience of being together would be impossible to quantify in terms of money. ( you might pay me a million dollars to skip that lunch, but i hereby promise to cheat, take your money, and tip well. )
some strange libertarian, randian thought tries to say these distinct concepts: money and value are the same. sometimes they even seem to be so because we so often exchange one for the other. yet they are in fact distinct, and not interchangeable.
money is not value. it is not speech. it is not a cat, or a dog, or a child, or a friend. it is money, and only that.
to treat these things the same seems a pretty poor philosophy. asking the question of why it matters is much more interesting.
How people think about money has many components. But money itself is simply a storage container for previous work. Instead of going from town to town finding individuals who are willing to trade directly what they have for what you have, you can “trade” your goods or services for pieces of paper and metal, which then means you can go to a different person and hand them those pieces of paper and metal to trade for what they have that you want, even though your specific goods/services aren’t anything they want at that time.
Money, like mathematics, “is systematic with no values implicit but its own functional processes”.
Meanwhile, as an obvious counter-example, the state of Indiana tried to legislate that pi=3. Mathematics can be used for wishful thinking just like money can. It’s not the fault of either math or money that incorrect or manipulative things are done in their name.
it’s really not though. that’s simply how we use it.
you can also use bottle caps, or i-owe-yous, or other such tokens equally as well. whether or not any of these are redeemable and at what value, however, is constantly in flux. money, gold, anything we exchange – is re-valued each time we exchange it. without the exchange, it’s quite useless. that’s why i too would call money a game.
other human constructs – like a battery – literally store work. money however remains notional. it can be modeled with math ( especially statistics ) – but it is not itself math.
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Money, like mathematics, “is systematic with no values implicit but its own functional processes”.
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this is where i think you start to go wrong. [ edit: oops! sorry that wasn’t you. you were quoting! ]
money has no value, and it has no internal processes. the value associated with money comes from the game of exchange.
mathematics – though it’s possibly up for some debate – does have some external meaning separate from the people who use it.
you mentioned pi earlier. you can legislate pi as equal to 3, but it doesn’t change the nature of pi. however, you can – and we do – legislate to change the nature of money and its exchange. i’d even go further and argue the force of law is necessary for all currency exchanges humans have.
you also said:
Free doesn’t only refer to money.
which is true in english. but, just as money and value are separate concepts there are different kinds of free. free as in beer, free as in speech, free as in a lack of entropy, and many more.
entropy increases invariably. but that does not mean everything must cost money. if you keep the meanings of “free” separate – then it’s definitely possible to have a lunch at no monetary cost. ( ex. someone buys you lunch. )
with respect to the article, the author states even if we apply market values to all human endeavors ( which has its limits since money and currency exchange are not necessary for all human endeavors ) you can still have cost free lunches when you take into account the long view of opportunity costs or technological improvements. ( ex. maybe mass production of lunches reduces cost at scale, enabling you to buy a lunch you could not have produced economically for yourself. )
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