Depot won’t pay enough for wheat. The U.S. government may decide to buy that wheat at higher prices. Suddenly there’s wheat everywhere. It turns out that people have bushels of it in the attic. The government is up to its dull, gaping mouth in wheat. The wheat has to be given away. The recipients of free wheat in the Inner City Wheatfare Program hawk the wheat at traffic lights, and what they get for it is exactly what people are willing to give. 3. You Can’t Get Something for Nothing. Everybody remembers this except politicians. Lately, it has been the fashion for American politicians to promise that government revenue—taxes—can be cut while government benefits—expenditures—remain intact. Benefits might even get larger. This will be done through efficiency, as if politicians are all going to invent the steam engine. Though, to the extent that steam is hot air, predictable jokes are invited. Politicians have trouble giving up the idea of something for nothing; it’s such a vote catcher. A government can give most people something for nothing by taxing the few people with money. This is how Sweden has gotten into trouble. There are never enough of those people with money. And the people with money are the people with accountants, tax lawyers, and bank accounts in Luxembourg, so they end up not paying their taxes. Or even if they do pay their taxes, like good Swedes, the people with money are also the people who know how to manipulate the system. Therefore, instead of the situation that Samuelson posited in Economics where “modern democracies take loaves from the wealthy and pass them out to the poor,” we get a situation where loaves are taken from the wealthy and subsidized opera tickets are passed back to them. A government can give all people something for nothing by simply printing more money. This doesn’t work, because it makes all the money worth less, as it did in Wiemar Germany, Carter America, and Yeltsin Russia. Inflation is a tax on the prudent, who watch the value of their conservative savings-bond and bank-account investments disappear. It’s a subsidy for the “big, swinging dicks” who can borrow money for harebrained speculatory schemes and pay it back later with cheap cash. And it’s a punishment to the old and the poor, who live on fixed incomes and who can’t expect to get a big cost-of-living adjustment retrieving soda cans from trash baskets. Finally, a government can give us something for nothing by running a deficit, by borrowing money from everybody and then giving everybody his money
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