Wake Up, America!
columnist: Steven Yates

Topic: Economics
Why TINSTAAFL?

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TINSTAAFL is a familiar combination of letters, but the idea behind it is worth revisiting to see the *why*.

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by Steven Yates
(Libertarian)
Wednesday, February 13, 2008

TINSTAAFL = There Is No Such Thing as a Free Lunch.

Probably everyone even remotely familiar with libertarian thought has encountered this phrase a time or two. Economist Milton Friedman used it when he was asked to explain economics in one sentence.

The phrase is worth revisiting, especially in these days of government quick-fixes for our troubled economy. We'll ask not just what TINSTAAFL means but why it is necessary.

Perhaps the bottom line of economics is the realization that everything we have, all the way down to the bare necessities of survival, must be produced. This calls for human action--to draw on the title of Ludwig von Mises's celebrated treatise. Mises understood action as the rational use of means to achieve prior-imagined ends.

Picture Robinson Crusoe, from the Daniel Defoe novel, sitting shipwrecked on the beach. If he sits in the sand and does nothing, what will happen? The necessary conditions for sustaining his life won't fall from the sky. Eventually he will die of thirst, starvation, or exposure. He needs to get up off his duff and do something, else he won't last very long.

That is the human economic condition. We need to get up off our duffs and do something. We need to act. Moreover, not just any random actions will do. Specific courses of actions are necessaryfirst to survive and then to advance and then to prosper.

Successful actions require investments of time, energy--and thought. The third of these is the most important. The use of our minds to apprehend our surroundings, correctly identifying the entities and processes going on around us, predicting what will happen if I do x, as opposed to doing y, is crucial. This is called acknowledging reality. The human actor who does not do so will eventually if not quickly find himself out of the game.

In this sense, there are no free lunches. But why is it the case that TINSTAAFL?

As a trained philosopher, and not an economist, this is my territory. Let me explain.

TINSTAAFL expresses something important about the relationship between human beings and the rest of reality--and about reality itself. Of course, proving statements about 'reality itself' has never been the easiest thing to do. But we can offer some reasonable hypotheses based on what we can observe.

The most reasonable hypothesis--the one most compatible both with the ideals of a philosophy of liberty and the one that best explains the successes that have been achieved when these ideals have been practiced--is that we are one kind of entity inhabiting a determinate universe of many kinds of entities. What these entities are determines what they will do, and what will happen when we interact with them (or act intelligently on them).

In other words, the fact that Robinson Crusoe is an entity of a specific kind--a human being--determines one of the most important facts of his existence, that he must eat. He is surrounded by entities of specific kinds. Their nature determines whether they can be ingested by him or not. For example, Robinson Crusoe may eat nuts, fruits, and vegetables. He cannot eat sand or wood shorn from trees.

And of course, he must use his mind to determine for himself what can be safely eaten and what should be avoided. If his use of his mind is successful, he flourishes. Otherwise not.

Reality is indifferent to human beings. We might call this the indifference axiom. A law-governed universe cannot 'take care of us.' Thus TINSTAAFL.

To my mind no specific theological implications one way or another can be deduced from TINSTAAFL. The fact that there are no free lunches implies nothing about the existence or nonexistence of a God. TINSTAAFL expresses a fact of the human condition, but says nothing about how this state of affairs originated cosmologically.

Be that as it may, reality has proven to be intelligible to us, at least enough to enable us to survive, flourish, and sometimes even prosper. Because our surroundings are full of entities of specific kinds, and because our minds are capable of grasping their essential natures--at least in part--we can act successfully in the world. We can shape it, or rearrange it, in ways more to our liking. This might be thought of as good power--power over objects.

Not just science, but civilization itself, owes its existence to this fact.

In civilization we are not Robinson Crusoes, of course. When Friday showed up, a whole new set of issues arose. On a day-to-day basis, we deal with many Fridays. But that is for another time.

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2008 Steven Yates, all rights reserved.
Published: Wednesday, February 13, 2008
Last modified: Wednesday, February 13, 2008

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