Eat up, but don’t forget to pay - lunch is never free
Friday, 12 June 2026
Rob Campbell has an extensive background in trade unionism, business leadership, governance and public service.
OPINION: The right are right – there is no free lunch. Not for anyone.
TANSTAFL – the slogan “there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch” - was once popular amongst a strange species called “rogergnomes”. It was even a bumper sticker.
In the 1980s, before we became Middle Earth, they proliferated, survived and like lingering Neanderthal genetics, their ideas still exist scattered across our political parties.
Like the rest of Rogernomics, Roger did not invent it. It dates back to a time when some bars offered free lunches to entice daytime drinkers and was popularised by Milton Friedman (the idea, not the drinking) in economic policy to highlight a negative view of government spending. The basic economic idea is that everything has a cost and that all costs are met – one way or another.
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On its own there is nothing particularly right or neo-liberal about that idea. It has been weaponised from a simple slogan, not deep thought. Weaponised to focus on government spending by people who do not like it, or rather do not like the prospect of being taxed to pay for it.
The idea is trotted out in various forms in a schoolmasterly manner to advise those seeking government support for free or less expensive public services that they are greedy and choosing to ignore the hard facts of unavoidable costs.
I can be a bit contrarian, but I have always thought that the slogan might just as well be a reminder to its proponents that not all costs are monetary, or only real if they directly affect you.
Costs in the economic sense include direct and indirect monetary costs, opportunity costs for choices foregone, and other social, health and environmental costs which may defy ready monetisation or even quantification but are no less real or costly. On someone, somewhere, perhaps when you least expect it, a cost will fall.
And costs are incurred by both things done and things not done. By anyone. So poor children may pay for the costs incurred by the actions or inactions of rich adults. Disabled people for those of the able. Old people for those of the young and vice versa. Inhabitants of poor countries for those in richer ones.
As the current US President recently mused about some costs falling where they were neither incurred or deserved, “that’s the way life is”.
Societies and communities are a function of people banding together to recognise this, and to share the many impacts. Each does so imperfectly. How deep the imperfections are obviously varies a lot, significantly depending on who holds the most economic power.
In a world where, as I read this week, “America’s richest 0.1 per cent are now worth more than the entire GDP of China” it’s a fair bet that costs are being met neither in proportion to their creation nor to ability to pay. Not so extreme here, but more than it was, and far from fair.
It is because there is no free lunchand everything costs that some people getting rich from control and utilisation of resources of any kindimpose costs on others, of some kind.
Unless the collective, the common, the public, the community, actively exercise an accounting for, collection and redistribution of those costs, the rich are eating a lunch which is not free but for which the rest of us are paying. Literally they are eating our lunch.
So it is a perversion of reality for those who most benefit from how our economic and social activity is organised (the real “beneficiaries” of our society) to see and portray demand for free or subsidised public services paid for by taxation on those beneficiaries as offending against the TANSTAFL principle. Nor those campaigning to prevent activities which will impose costs of any kind disproportionately on those who will not benefit directly from the activity.
But its not hard to see why these real beneficiaries are prepared to spend big to protect and promote their interests – each of their claims is an effort to ensure that a lunch they well know is not free is paid for by someone else whether they can afford it or not.
So please, spare the rest of us crocodile tears about taxes on higher income gains or wealth. We know that all those things represent is a lunch paid for by others. We have the receipts and would like them paid now thank you.
And to the genetic traces of the lost tribe of rogergnomes lurking in Labour or other opposition parties not on board with the reality of lunch and who should pay, who may think that some social expenses account which they can access grants them immunity, wake up. The slogan applies to us all.