When reading Mohamed Jemmali’s “Food, water should be free for all” (ODE, March 8), my first thought was, “Where do free lunches exist? Maybe in Utopia, but not here.” Here, everything has a cost, even if the user does not pay for it.
To use an extreme example, if we force people to produce and serve food for nothing, have we made the cost of food any lower? No, we’ve merely shifted the buyers’ current share of the cost to the suppliers. Unless something is unlimited in nature, people have to use time and energy to produce it. If the users are then not paying the cost of the suppliers’ time and energy, someone else is.
Even though we are finding ways to make food and drinking water more abundant and accessible, they are still limited in nature. Somebody has to risk time and energy desalinating water. Somebody has to risk time and energy producing and growing food. Somebody has to risk time and energy extracting raw materials and generating electricity. People are typically compensated with money for doing these things.
If I wanted shelter, which motive would more likely get me it? People’s generosity or a builder’s desire to make money? Probably the second. The builder builds the house; I then pay the builder for the time, money and energy used to build the house. I’d love a house for nothing, as anyone would, but that means nothing if no one is willing to build it. If we mandate houses be provided for no cost to the users, what do we expect would happen? Many people would exit the building business and go to more profitable sectors, and we would have far greater homelessness. The same is true with food and water.
The free market is the one system that allows people to become wealthy by providing for others. Entrepreneurs have to figure out what people lack and are willing to pay for. Entrepreneurs then risk their time, money and energy to provide it and get paid in return. Some become wealthy doing so, and that is fine. I’d much rather people become wealthy providing for others than any other way. The very technology Jemmali refers to (desalination and hydroponic technology) was not developed due to generosity; it was developed due to the profit motive.
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