SOUTH Africa is the Garden of Eden, the land of milk and honey, a dreamland of free lunches. We enjoy free consumer protection, education, welfare, healthcare and services. We are promised lavish infrastructure, beneficiation and a healthy tobacco-free planet by 2040.The Free Market Foundation is considering awarding doctorates in economics to people who spot the error. All they need to know and apply is one word, tanstaafl: the acronym for "there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch", coined by economists during the Great Depression to counteract the disastrous myth that government benefits are free. Even illustrious professors of economics have difficulty remembering something so elementary. That benefits have costs is the greatest insight of economics, superficially simple, hard to grasp, on a par with Charles Darwin’s evolution and Albert Einstein’s relativity.That there are no benefits without disadvantages is close to impossible to internalise. I tried explaining tanstaafl to a...
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