In Truth? It’s Not Free

By Scott K. Fish

If I’m born with a right to free health care, who’s the guy born with the responsibility to pay for it? That question should be asked of all government services or programs. Other questions should be asked too. For example, what is the up side and bad side of government services or programs?

As years go by it seems we have more people with neither a clue nor a care about the guy born with the responsibility to pay for government programs/services made available to others at a reduced cost or no cost.

Bond issues on Maine ballots asks voters to say yes or no to government borrowing money, repaid with interest. It’s the same as my buying something — a car — using my credit card. In 2014 I bought a 2012 Ford for $14,000. Next month I will finally repay my auto loan with interest in full. The monthly payments I’ve made against my auto loan for five years will end. I will own the car.

But voters’ false notion that bond issue money is free money always prevails.

Showing a similar way of thinking, I many times heard Maine legislators arguing in the House or Senate in favor of starting a new state government program, or expanding an old one, because the federal government was offering matching dollars to do so.

“We may as well take the money,” a legislator tells his colleagues. “If we don’t take it the federal government will give OUR money to some other state.”

Government borrowing/spending is paid for by taxpayers, mostly through a tax on our income, and sales/excise taxes. Costs imposed by government on businesses are factored into the price of products/services we buy.

Essayist E.B. White reckoned with that truth in his 1940 piece, “Lime.”

“I have become a party to one of the so-called ‘social gains’ we heard so much about during the political campaign. I don’t know whether I like it or not. The lime for my [farm] field was a gift to me from all the taxpayers of the United States, a grudging gift on the part of about half of them who disavow the principles of the AAA, a gift in the name of fertility, conservation, and humanity.”

President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA), a part of FDR’s federal New Deal, was, according to Wikipedia, “designed to boost agricultural prices by reducing surpluses. The Government bought livestock for slaughter and paid farmers subsidies not to plant on part of their land.”

Said Mr. White, “I believe it also is true that a government committed to the policy of improving the nation by improving the condition of ‘some’ of the individuals will eventually run into trouble in attempting to distinguish between a national good and a chocolate sundae.”

At the very least, I think elected officials, government spokespeople, and news reporters should stop using the word “free” when describing government programs that are actually “gifts from…taxpayers.”

“I think that one hazard of the ‘benefit’ form of government is the likelihood that there will be an indefinite extension of benefits, each new one establishing an easy precedent for the next,” continued E.B. White in his “Lime” essay.

If the truth of the matter is still a consideration, calling government programs/services “free” when they’re not — is, at best, lazy and sloppy use of the language. Worse, it’s a lie. 

“Another hazard [of ‘benefit’ government] is that by placing large numbers of people under obligation to their government there will develop a self-perpetuating party capable of supplying itself with a safe majority,” White concluded.

Politicians, activists, and reporters are generally upfront about proposed new and expanded government anti-smoking efforts paid for by raising the cost of cigarettes and other tobacco products.

That kind of transparency should be a standard reporting procedure. Just don’t call programs/services “free” when they carry a cost.

Scott K. Fish has served as a communications staffer for Maine Senate and House Republican caucuses, and was communications director for Senate President Kevin Raye. He founded and edited AsMaineGoes.com and served as director of communications/public relations for Maine’s Department of Corrections until 2015. He is now using his communications skills to serve clients in the private sector.

|DNP:true