There is no more expensive thing than a free gift.
The current fast food that we have is inexpensive when you buy it, but the long-term costs of eating it and the long-term costs to society, are much too high. This cheap food, when you add up all the total costs, is much too expensive.
Free lunches don't come cheap.
Anything free costs twice as much in the long run or turns out worthless.
Profits, like sausages... are esteemed most by those who know least about what goes into them.
People who thing that they are getting something for nothing, by having government provide what they would otherwise have to buy in the private market, are not only kidding themselves by ignoring the taxes that government has to take from them in order to give them the appearance of something for nothing.
The big print giveth, and the fine print taketh away.
In fact, the whole thing about prohibition is this: it isn't the initial cost, it's the humidity.
But this is a true saying among men: the gifts of enemies are no gifts and profitless.
Even if you see a great performance, it's not always great getting there. There are injuries... Intrinsically or unconsciously, people understand that - people see those performances, and they know there are stories behind that.
On Wall Street, the industry in which I grew up, a culture in which 'my word is my bond' shifted over the past few decades toward one where the big print can say 'Free' while the small print gives the real costs.
The black and merciless things that are behind the great possessions.
The benefits of a tariff are visible. Union workers can see they are "protected". The harm which a tariff does is invisible. It's spread widely. There are people that don't have jobs because of tariffs but they don't know it.
I've never turned over a fig leaf yet that didn't have a price tag on the other side.
Morality is like a field of flowers beneath which the corpses are piled in a thousand layers. It is an evolved mechanism whereby the human organism proceeds through life sustained on every side by bonds of mutual interest.
Hiding spending does not reduce spending.
War will of itself discover and lay open the hidden and rankling wounds of the victorious party.
The true cost to the world of a burger is far greater than the money you hand over to buy it.
Lunches don't get free just because you don't see the prices on the menu. And economists don't get popular by reminding people of that.
The reality is gas prices should be much more expensive then they are because we're not incorporating the true damage to the environment and the hidden costs of mining oil and transporting it to the U.S. Whenever you have an unpriced externality, you have a bit of a market failure, to the degree that eternality remains unpriced.
Specialization makes it easy to forget about the filth of the coal-fired power plant that is lighting this pristine computer screen, or the backbreaking labor it took to pick the strawberries for my cereal, or the misery of the hog that lived and died so I could enjoy my bacon.
Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing.
There is no such thing as free regulation.
What you get free costs too much.
The writing has been on the wall for some years now, but we are a nation illiterate in the language of the wall. The writing just gets bigger. Something will eventually bring down the charming, infuriating naïveté of Americans that allows us our blithe consumption and cheerful ignorance of the secret ugliness that bring us whatever we want.
