Whenever I hear people use the word "free" to describe a government-subsidized program or effort, I always think to Inigo Montoya in Rob Reiner's film The Princess Bride: "You keep using that word; I do not think it means what you think it means."

News flash: there's no free lunch (no pun intended).

Bridget Huber at Mother Jones is a skilled propagandist for the leftist, pro-authoritarianism cause, and in her latest essay, it's easy to see why.

Huber opens her piece with this:

For the first two years of the pandemic, there was such a thing as free lunch. ... To blunt a spike in hunger caused by job losses and school closures, the federal government made school meals free. ... But Republicans blocked a renewal of the program last spring, accusing Democrats of exploiting emergency measures to enact lasting changes.

First of all, as D. Parker noted yesterday, we must define the actual crisis rather than enter the playing field on the left's terms.  The inability to afford food is not simply a crisis of job losses and school closures; rather, it is a crisis leftist policies in action — namely, an ever-expanding and intervening Big Government, and a move away from the Judeo-Christian ethics set.  The "pandemic"-era job losses and school closures can be almost entirely attributed to authoritarian government shutdowns; and impoverished children in need of food can exclusively be attributed to a breakdown in a moral society with the myriad of assaults against the nuclear family in calculated efforts to remove fathers from homes.  (The "War on Poverty," welfare benefits incentivizing single-mother households, "sexual revolution"...sound familiar?)

Next, and I don't know who needs to hear this — actually, I do, and "they" are the intellectually deficient leftists like Huber — the federal government is not a self-sustaining unit, and they do not produce capital.

There are two ways "services" like "free" lunches are provided:

The first is that people who do produce capital (either through their labor or the selling of their goods) are taxed — that is, money is taken by threat of incarceration, or death, given the IRS's weaponized agents — which in turn funds the "services."  Alternatively, the government simply spends the money and funds the programs, putting us all into debilitating debt.  (If you want to induce nausea, go watch the national debt clock rapidly tick.)

Huber then cites author Jennifer Gaddis, who asserts something along the lines of, "There's long been a debate over who bears responsibility over school lunch."  Here's a novel idea: how about we stop encouraging the victimhood mentality and instead return to an ethos of self-responsibility?  How about the parents who lay down and created those children bear the responsibility of being the providers for those little ones?  (No, murder is not an option to evade responsibility.)

Huber further claims of Gaddis:

School food started to be seen as welfare. 'It created the conditions for a cultural backlash against the idea of expanding the program[.]'

Again, news flash: It is welfare.  Taxpayer-funded programs to feed other people, no matter how needy, is the very definition of welfare.  Some people, like myself, believe that government handouts actually cripple a person's ability to rise out of poverty, doing more harm than good.  (Hard data would support the postulation.)

Alas, Huber and the gaggle of media idiots seem intent on atrophy rather than weaponizing their God-given ability to critically think.

Image: Free image, Pixabay license, no attribution required.