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It’s Priceless

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to live in a world where there were no prices?
If you happened to want a Rolex or a Rolls-Royce, you could just go get one– or two if you wanted– and not have to worry about ugly little things like price tags.
After Arthur Goldberg had served on the Supreme Court, he lamented that more of society’s problems could not be dealt with as that court dealt with them– by reaching a decision and then declaring, "It is so ordered."
If you could put it "off budget," wouldn’t you buy a second home at the beach or maybe a yacht to go out on the water? Why not live a little– or a lot?
Politicians have more ways of escaping from prices than Houdini had ways of escaping from locks. When savvy pols want to hand out goodies, but don’t want to take responsibility for raising taxes to pay for them, they can tax people who can’t vote– namely the next generation– by getting the money by selling government bonds that future taxpayers will have to redeem.
Even such deficit spending leaves a record, however– a national debt that is the ghost of Christmas past. But politicians can even get around that.
Some people may go away mad if they are ignored. Costs are not like that. You can ignore them all you want and they still won’t go away.
While you are enjoying all the goodies that politicians are sending your way, you may notice that your taxes are going up or that the money you earn or the money you have saved won’t buy as much as it used to.
If you are someone looking for a job– maybe a young person entering the labor force or a woman coming back into the labor force after spending a few years taking care of a small child— you may find that there aren’t as many jobs available as there used to be before employers had to pay for "social responsibilities," in addition to paying for the value of an employee’s work.
Desperate times can call for desperate measures, so maybe you will try to find out from some economist what is going on. You may not get any much better explanation than "There is no free lunch"– which is one of many reasons why economists are not popular.
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