Free Is Not Cheap

Market culture is good at noticing things with a price tag and worse at noticing things that only become visible once they are gone. Air, trust, language, safety and time may have no direct price, but they certainly have a cost.

• air;
• sleep;
• health, while you have it;
• language;
• trust;
• friendship;
• safety;
• being able to go outside;
• time next to someone close to you.

That is exactly why they are easy to overlook. The bill arrives only after the loss.

What is free, however, does not always exist without expense. A park has to be maintained. Friendship takes time. Clean air is produced by regulation, technology and the work of people whose names generally never appear on the horizon.

Not every intangible thing is unreal.

The state, money, a university, a company and a marriage exist because of shared recognition of rules. A border really is not drawn on the ground by nature. But crossing it can change your taxes, the laws that apply to you and the probability of meeting an armed man in uniform.

Institutions made by people are real in their consequences.

Symbols are not empty either. A flag, a name, a logo and a family photograph have little value as material. Their meaning comes from history, trust and collective memory.

The difficulty arises when a symbol is credited with value regardless of what stands behind it.

A brand can convey information about quality. A degree, about training completed. The name of an organisation, about reputation. But these signals need periodic checking. A logo survives a decline in the product more easily than the customer does.

It helps to distinguish:

• the physical object;
• the function;
• the symbolic meaning;
• the legal meaning;
• the price;
• the personal value.

A passport is paper. It is also a document, a right, an identifier and the possibility of crossing a border. The statement “it’s only paper” is usually made by someone who does not currently need a visa.

The cost of what is free becomes visible the moment it runs out. A courtyard where children walk on their own costs parents nothing — while it stays that way. As soon as it stops being that way, there appears a rota for drop-offs and pick-ups, payment for after-school care, and sometimes a second car. Nothing new has been bought: something nobody ever invoiced for stopped working, and its function had to be replaced with paid parts.

Hence an unpleasant consequence for any budget, household or municipal. It shows not what is important, but what has already broken badly enough that someone started paying for it. Until the line item appears, everything looks free.