Jonah hits it out of the park again.

[On this day that Andrew Breitbart moves on to his great reward, with the Complex, Culture Smog, and the MSM using the news to damn with faint praise, I’m using a transcript of a recent article by Jonah Goldberg to show why Brietbart was needed and effective. Jonah Goldberg often gets to the point, and this time he hits it out of the park. JimG33]

TANSTAAFL, After All These Years.

Conservatives have rightly worked themselves into a lather over President Obama’s pas de deux of statist effrontery. First came the HHS rule attempting to erase the religious liberty-exemption when religious liberty runs afoul of secular or progressive values, and then came his supposed “accommodation” of opponents of the new rule, which only made the situation worse. Under the accommodation, the government forces insurance companies to magically pay for “preventive services” without passing those costs on to consumers or taxpayers. It’s all according, to President Obama, “free”.

And this is my greatest frustration in the controversy. Before we can scavenge for the disgorged contents of this whole piñata—the trampling of religious liberty, the bureaucratic bullying, the folly of socialized medicine, Obama’s naked hypocrisy, his betrayal of liberal Catholics—there’s the basic, irreducible, fundamental issue: The man is treating us all like idiots.

Because it is a bedrock fact of human existence, never mind economics: There is no free anything. Everything costs time, energy, or matter.

I really thought this was a settled issue. Any sentence that begins “the government will provide for free…” is at best a half-truth, and more often a whole lie. It can be a half-truth if you’re saying that some people will get something “for free” with the caveat that someone else is paying for it. And that someone else is not “the government”, because the government doesn’t pay for anything. Taxpayers—either now or in the future—pay for it all. As Frederic Bastiat once said, “Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors 

to live at the expense of everybody else.”

“The free-lunch myth,” explained Milton Friedman, is “the belief that somehow or other, government can spend money at nobody’s expense.” You can’t print money to pay for things at no cost without making people poorer, and you can’t tax businesses to avoid paying for things with taxpayer money. Businesses are people, [no matter what OWS believes] as both Friedman and Mitt Romney have rightly said. When you tax a business, you are taxing the owners, the employees, and the customers of the business. If you go to YouTube, you can type in “Milton Friedman Free Lunch” and he’ll explain it better than I can.

Obama’s “accommodation” is an insult to everyone. His basic assumption is that we’re all morons and won’t figure out that if there’s no such thing as a free lunch, there’s no such thing as free abortifacients and sterilizations.  [Not to mention free Georgetown Law School approved pills and condoms.] You could be in favor of taxpayer-funded castrations, and still be offended by Obama’s gamble that Americans are too dumb to understand what he’s saying.

Alas, many reporters covering this controversy are in fact just that dumb.

Jonah Goldberg, National Review Magazine, March 5 2012, pg. 10.

[And now Professor Friedman.]