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Quote of the Day: TANSTAAFL
“There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch” — Robert Heinlein
I recall the first time I was exposed to this expression was during the science fiction binge reading period of my late teens. It was from reading a novel by Robert Heinlein, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. Mr. Heinlein was a Naval Academy graduate, and after experiencing health issues left the Navy and did some additional graduate work in physics, which I am sure in hindsight influenced his notion that the universe gives nothing for free, and wound it into his opines on the nature of men, and well … nature.
Why do I think exposure to college-level physics engenders a viewpoint of a curmudgeonly universe? Because after three semesters of physics, and then later grinding through, in greater computational depth, three more semesters of thermodynamics, it becomes clear that TANSTAAFL is in fact built into the operating system of the universe. Every exchange of one form of energy to another comes with a price. Every exchange of matter to energy, or energy back to matter (truly an exorbitant exchange) comes with a cost. This theory is enshrined in Laws of Thermodynamics and here are the rules as approximately coined by my introductory Physics class professor, who was riffing off Ginsberg’s parody theorem, which helps you get your mind around the “big picture.”
The first law states: You are not going to win in the exchange game,
The second law states: You will not break even in the exchange,
The third law notes: That you cannot even bow out of the game.
To date, no one has ever demonstrated the elusive perpetual motion machine.
The consumption of energy is at the very heart of our society’s promise to a life that allows leisure rather than a Hobbesian existence of nasty, brutish, and short. Everything we touch has a component of energy, we eat it (fertilizer), harvesting with it, transport everything with it, or handle something directly composed from an energy product (“Plastics” was the advice Mr. Robinson bestowed on a young Benjamin Braddock, in The Graduate). It heats us, cool us, moves us, eases our chores, anyone recall that an entire Monday used to be allotted for the laundry, (mostly by the ladies, want to relive those great times?) and it entertains us. Is there nothing that sweet transposition of energy cannot do?
Later I was exposed from my wife’s studies in business accounting the works of Milton Friedman, a brilliant economist who reiterated that TANSAAFL in not purely a matter, of well … matter, but of the economic man. We all strive for a win-win exchange, but it all depends on where you draw the boundaries and temporal limits of any transactional exchange.
So given the nearly universal and intuitive exposure we have to this principle, why does half of one of the largest collection of the most highly educated, sophisticated, and enlightened societies of men and women, since the earliest records of the musing from the cradle of civilization on the structure of our humanity, do they still think we can get free stuff from any government?
God’s universe unequivocally says no, how do we humble men think we can say otherwise?
Published in Science & Technology
I think Heinlein invented Tanstaafl.
I thought so too but wiki thinks otherwise.
I suspect they don’t want to give him total credit, given that wiki is a semi hidden lefty enterprise in mass
endocrination.IndoctrinationFIFM
They want to mess with our endrocrine systems?
Great post and right on.
I think Jonah has insight into why in that the left thinks the hard problems can be solved. Conservative thought is some problems are intractable.
No Law of Thermodynamics accounts for The Law of Magical Thinking–which is the Law of The Universe occupied by the “free lunch” “free birth-control” “free college” crowd.
As long as the host is alive, parasites can live without violating any physical laws. And we are shamed into not cutting them off.
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Fiat currency. So long as the dollar is secure regardless of debts and liabilities, there is in fact free money.
Suppose you were assured that fire will eventually burn you, yet in your experience it never did. For every action there is a reaction. But delay the reaction enough and it ceases to inform decisions. That goes for rewards as well, by the way.
Theoretically, there is a definite end to free money. Practically, nobody can see that end.
For the same reason people buy lottery tickets: because, within the cosmic entropic swirl, there remain local maxima — and we all hope to be lucky enough to be atop one.
Well, that and growing up ahistorically rich and safe, as most Americans have.
(PS Great post!)
We’ll just borrow more from our grandchildren.
Larry Niven used TANSTAAFL extensively in his work. But it would not surprise me if the first use was Heinlein’s.
I’ve heard the rules like this
1 you can’t get something for nothing
2 you can’t even break even
3 you can’t stop playing the game
Which is essentially what you wrote above
That can be said of one’s own life. We are all going to die, but today I’m probably not going to die. Life is a free gift from the Universe … up until it isn’t … so I’d better get the most of it now.
So it is with “free money”. The system will collapse eventually regardless of what government and/or society does, but it’s probably not going to collapse today. Therefore, money is a free gift from the system … up until it isn’t … so I’d better get the most of it now.
The error in both cases is that entropy is not constant. It cannot be avoided, but it can be sped up. Therefore the fatalist view is counter-productive.
God does not play dice with the universe. He plays an ineffable game of his own devising, which often seems to the other players (i.e., everybody) as something like an obscure version of poker, played with blank cards in a dark room, with a dealer who won’t tell you the rules or show you his hand, and who smiles all the time.
(From “Good Omens” by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. Also from memory, so I probably butchered it.)
This is the best book ever.
From the media buzz, it seems that medical care/insurance is the biggest need of Americans, but I think it is having a stable, healthy, energy system. If people had to choose between health insurance and electricity, would they understand then, how great energy on demand is? Doctors and nurses cannot do much without it, neither can actors and actresses.
The right to energy is more important than the right to health insurance, IMO. But neither should be rights, just free will choices. If you spend more than needed on either of those two segments, that dollar doesn’t get spent at the box office, or grocery store, etc.
The working class pays a higher percentage of their income for needs: food, shelter, energy. The upper and rich are not as restricted in the excess amount of money they have available for other things.
Subsidies are guilt offerings, and claiming ownership of citizens.
Don’t get me going on the collective and profound idiocy the left has with their understanding of energy and the consumption there of has on their mostly wastrel lifestyles. I have been intimately familiar with solar energy for the balance of my career (never worked on a nuclear power spacecraft, so call it 40 years) so to listen to intellectual morons expound how we can remold our society thru wind and solar power is a conceit I really cannot fathom.
It is a real sham that they call themselves progressives while reaching back to near ancient substitutes for “human power”.
Never trust Apple’s suggested spelling of a word while you are struggling on a Stairmaster. I was trying to beat the QOTD reminder from our esteemed moderator then foolishly felt compelled to answer Randy’s first comment.
It’s a good thing (really) I am not an English major.
A few weeks ago we attended a performance at the Carpenter Center* of Cal State University Long Beach, where this plaque is embedded in the walkway outside the entrance:
*apparently funded by 70s pop star Richard Carpenter and his wife.
The early environmental movement, and its offspring sustainability movement, rested on two tenets: (a) there is no free lunch, and (b) matter can change in form but it cannot be destroyed.
The first tenet is a different version of my husband’s favorite saying, “For every action, there is a reaction.” Environmentalists wanted people to understand that everything they do, no matter how innocuous it may seem to be, affects its surrounding environment. This became the underlying principle of environmental impact studies, which attempted to predict that impact, including the “far-flung impact.”
The second tenet was a way to express quickly the need to consider the life cycle of anything we make, all the way to the time when what we’ve made is no longer useful to us in the way it was originally. Throwing something away doesn’t make it disappear. It simply changes its location and chemical makeup through deterioration.
Much of the environmentalists’ original work was good and necessary. Businesses were using public waterways to discharge their manufacturing waste cheaply. As far as I’m concerned, and I know everyone else agrees, these businesses had no right to poison fishing and drinking water. Nor did they have the right to leave the rest of us with the bill for the cleanup of those waterways. The activists generated the political will to clean up polluted waterways and prevent future pollution. All good.
Environmentalists make up a big part of the Democratic Party, so it is fascinating to me how little they apply their own good common sense. I see their shortsightedness all the time in everything they do these days. I shake my head. I can’t believe it’s the same people.
For example, the recent history of the passage and implementation of ObamaCare is rife with examples of this shortsightedness. It’s very frustrating. I wish the Republicans would throw the Democrats’ own words back at them sometimes.
A good local example has come up in recent years. The federal government environmental agencies encouraged the growth of the seal population on Monomoy Island, a federally controlled wildlife refuge. The local fishermen tried to tell the feds that this was not a good idea. Seals eat a lot of fish for one thing, and they are also food for sharks, which will come close to shore to get them. Sure enough, we are losing some of our fishing grounds to these seals, and now we have a shark problem. The government simply doesn’t consider the effects of their actions.
I know. The Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria took quite a long time getting here. Can you imagine a cruise ship that leaves on Friday, and if the wind is right gets back next Friday, but it could be Saturday, or Sunday. Better yet, no wind means no electricity for toilets, etc. I think that happened on a cruise ship not to long ago, and the experience wasn’t so romantic.
Way back in the dark ages, a science teacher in my high school taught a course called “Conservation.” It was about our natural environment, and his goal was to teach good stewardship of the same: Basically don’t be wasteful, don’t leave a mess, be responsible for what you have and what you do with it. I’ve since learned (by experience) that we have a responsibility to everything we own – to use it properly and to pass it on in a responsible manner. Every acquisition comes with its own parcel of responsibility. This doesn’t seem like good news to me, but there it is.
It is worth a few minutes to listen to Bill Cosby’s description of his understanding of electricity. Now that he is a non-person it might be hard to find it but, if you can find it, it is hilarious and probably quite true.
All economies, but especially modern economies, depend on cheap and abundant energy. The idea of intentionally making our energy more expensive, or trying to force people to use less of it is just brain dead leftism, sorry, I repeat myself.
Great post.
When you are of the left and not so secretly despise the Proles, upon who’s labors you are incognizant of, and who sustain your pinnacle existence, they relish the twofer of both pricing them out of existence, while morally preening on having saved the environment from their rapacious energy using joys. (NASCAR, Hunting, RV camping, Fish trolling, ATV’s in the wilderness, etc, etc, etc)
This is why we have so many social problems, unfunded liabilities, and the debt to GDP gets worse and worse.
Fiat money vs. energy
My favorite Heinlein aphorism is from one of his juvenile novels, where a father advises his son who’s contemplating skirting the rules for entering a contest:
It was a different time.
While I have always been more partial to Stranger in a Strange Land, this one is almost as good. The full money quote for this post:
But there is so much more there. Another quick, pertinent example for our times:
That nagging feeling that some conservative, somewhere, is having fun.
It’s certainly in the running in its genre. It is Heinlein’s best book.
Funny thing about Augsburg: One of the bigger law firms in town is “Gollman, Brosche und Heinlein”.
There is an “iron law of GOVCO consequences”: For every GOVCO action there is an opposite reaction which is greater than the intended result of the original GOVCO action.
Life is about trade offs.
I don’t want areas owned by others that are centers for crime. Thus, I am OK with my government having the power to do something about blighted areas. That means they have the power to abuse it too. Trade off. My job is to work to throw the bums out if they abuse it too much.