Explaining to Liberals Why Everything Can’t Be Free

As we speak, Elon Musk and his team of legendary 20-something math nerds are going over the government’s books with a fine-toothed comb, looking for waste, fraud, and unneeded government employees to cut. According to Elon Musk’s latest estimate, he thinks there’s something like 1.7 trillion dollars in waste and fraud that can be cut. PER YEAR:

On the other hand, Democrats have had a different approach. They don’t think we need to cut anything. In fact, they’re going nuts over cuts to wasteful spending. I mean, “cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs” level nuts:

Additionally, they keep calling for more and more things to be made “free.”

Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have been calling for college to be made “free” for years and apparently, Joe Biden agreed with them because he put a lot of effort into waiving off people’s college loans even as the government continued to hand out more college loans.

During RFK’s confirmation hearing, Bernie Sanders asked RFK if healthcare is a “human right,” which is another way of saying it should be “free”:

Democrats have called for free childcare, free paid leave footed by the taxpayers after a pregnancy, free sex changes, and giving illegals everything from phones to cash to rent for free. They want as many people on welfare as possible for as long as possible. Their fix for deliberately shutting down the economy during COVID was just to send people stimulus checks in the mail… and we could go on

It’s unbelievable that things have sunk to this level, but to Hell with it, let’s answer the big question.

Why can’t the government just give people whatever they want for free?

Now, you might say, “Well, wait. Can’t they just print money?” Yes, they can. However – I don’t want to spend multiple paragraphs talking about monetary theory here, so I am going to keep this simple – dollars are not “value.” Dollars are just a representation of value. If you increase the supply of dollars without increasing the actual value of the things the dollar represents, you lessen the value of the dollars and you get inflation. That’s exactly what happened during COVID and it’s why everyone is complaining about how much eggs, rent, and cars cost today compared to what they did 5 years ago.

So, just printing large amounts of money ends up being counterproductive.

Ultimately, the same could be said of borrowing money. When the government borrows money, that money needs to be paid back with interest. For a business, that can often make sense. If a business takes a million-dollar loan to buy a piece of equipment that allows them to create 10 million dollars worth of value, they can afford to pay the loan back with interest and have plenty of money left over. Very rarely do the government’s loans pay off in that fashion and taking them out to give people things for “free” is just a loss. We’re already 36 TRILLION dollars in debt and we paid 882 billion in interest alone in just 2024 as a result of doing that.

We also cannot forget that saying, “The government is giving you this for free” is another way of saying, “The government is giving you something paid for by taxpayers.” That’s who ultimately funds the government. You. Me. Everyone who pays taxes.

So, for the government to give a group of people something for “free,” it means another group of people has to have money they earned confiscated by the government so it can be given to those other people for “free.”

How much more of the money that you EARN do you want to give to other people for free? As a practical matter, we know that the typical answer is either “none” or “very little” by the fact that we have such an extremely progressive tax system. The middle class doesn’t want to pay more taxes. If anything, most people think their taxes are already far too high.

“Well, wait,” liberals will say, “what about the rich? We can just have them pay for everything since they don’t pay their fair share.”

Except that claim is a scam, too. Keep in mind, as a starting point, the rich are already paying a wildly disproportionate share of the taxes:

The top 10% of income-earning Americans make up 48% of the gross income, but they pay 71% of the taxes. That definitely sounds like they’re paying their “fair share.”

Still, they have more money, right? Even if we’re soaking them, so what? Why not soak them even more? Well, as a starting point, just as we’ve seen rich people move from states that have their tax burden rise too high, they can also move from COUNTRIES that tax them too heavily. That would be bad because the more rich people we have here, the more taxes they pay here. That’s a good thing and losing that revenue is a bad thing for our country.

Even setting that aside, going back to the famous fairy tale, how much can you take before you, “kill the goose that lays the golden eggs?” Do you really want to put taxes on the richest Americans that are so high you make them retire to a villa in the countryside instead of producing 71% of America’s income taxes? Sane people would say “No” because we already have a large debt and if tax revenues from the wealthy were to drop off a cliff, it would mean the middle class would have to be soaked to make up for it.

However, as we all know, many liberals are not sane and they would say, “Sure! Hit them with a wealth tax! Take it all!” Let’s say we did just that with the richest Americans. Let’s do the full Elizabeth Warren bit and loot EVERYTHING America’s billionaires have. We’ll zero them out, take them off the board and then we’ll have lots of money for “free” projects then, right?

Not so much.

“There are now 801 billionaires based in the United States with a combined wealth totaling $6.22 trillion, according to an Institute for Policy Studies analysis of the Forbes Real Time Billionaire List.”

6.22 trillion dollars sounds like a lot of money. Heck, it is a lot of money. Almost an IMPOSSIBLE amount of money, but it’s not even enough to run the federal government for a single year. In Joe Biden’s final year in office, the government spent 6.75 trillion dollars – and that’s before we add any new “free” programs. Also, again, you can’t forget that we’re talking about wiping all these billionaires out financially, which means the next year, there would be a MASSIVE DROP OFF of income taxes paid. What happens if a farmer eats all of his seed corn and has none to plant for next year? He starves.

America doesn’t even have the money to pay for our current budget without going into debt, so it seems obvious that we can’t afford any new “free” programs. In fact, “free” programs shouldn’t even be ON THE TABLE until we’ve paid off our debt and are running a surplus. Not only is that highly unlikely to ever happen in the first place, even if it did, we’d almost certainly be better off letting people keep more of their own money rather than taxing them on their earnings and giving it away for “free.”

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