One sentence that summarizes economics is, “there’s no such thing as a free lunch.” Sure, anyone can have a lunch and not pay for it, but it still is not free. Everything costs something to someone. Even if you don’t pay for your lunch, someone will, whether it be your lunch partner, the restaurant manager, the owner, or the people who supply the raw materials to make that food. Everything acquired by a person or a community is accompanied by a price, monetary or not. Jaime Fox said, “Ain’t nothing in this world for free, and it blows my mind how many fools just don’t get that.” I agree with this statement. Many forms of literature, such as Martin Luther King’s speech “I Have a Dream” and “Learning to Read and Write” by Fredrick Douglas, have documented the high price paid for freedom and basic human rights; they show that even freedom, where the root word is “free”, has an expensive tag.
Usually, when we think of something as being free, we associate it with money. I believe Jaime Fox’s statement can be applied to so much more than “bought” materials. For many years, African Americans and other minorities have been fighting for freedom, a right that has been won with hard work, spilled blood, broken bones, and tears. This is the ultimate price tag. In Dr. King’s speech he claimed that by signing the Constitution and the Declaration of independence, the “architects of our republic wrote a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.
The Essay on There Ain’t No Such Thing as Free Lunch
“ There Ain’t No Such Thing as Free Lunch” is made famous by writer Robert A. Heinlein in 1966 in his novel “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. ” The novel discusses the problems as an outcome of an unbalanced economy (Heinlein, 1966). It is also used among economics literature demonstrating an opportunity cost, meaning, in order to get or do something, you need to give up something. This is ...
This note was a promise that all men-yes, Black men as well as white men-would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned” (447).
He urges his audience, of both white and black citizens, to fight for these rights promised to all Americans. “We have come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice” (448).
He insists that they fight with their minds and not their force. Dr. King and all those who listened to him, who fought with him, who put their lives in danger with him, they, put the down payment on endless lease we have taken out on freedom. Although Dr. King’s discussion of freedom has affected everyone in America personally, his address of freedom was on a larger scale, reflecting on its cost to an entire culture of people and the benefits of paying that cost. It is ironic that if anything in the world were to be free, it would make sense that the right to pursue happiness, the liberty to walk into a public restroom, and the right to vote would be amongst those things.
They are not. These liberties cost the lives, integrity and happiness of many people that came before us. He addresses this in “I Have a Dream,”some of you have come from where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive.” Here, Martin Luther King, is painting the price of freedom. It cost suffering.
It cost faith, and it cost perseverance. No, nothing in this world is free, not even the basic conditions that should be granted to a person by just being alive. Fredrick Douglas, another advocate of freedom, has also written about what it cost him to be free. Unlike, Dr. King, his discussion on the costs of freedom are more persona, he explains how he obtained the freedom to read and write. As a slave, his mistress taught him to read and write, a practice highly forbidden at the time because it is a form of freedom.
The Essay on Our Freedom To Read
OUR FREEDOM TO READ Many rights are guaranteed to us or implied within our constitutional tradition. The right to read is one of these, and like the other rights it can be used wisely or foolishly. To deny the freedom of choice in fear that it may be unwisely used is to destroy the freedom itself. Book censorship should not be allowed because the right to read freely enables many students to ...
When a person learns how to read or write, they has the freedom to acquire information and express opinion. He describes his mistress as having been “tender hearted” and “that for her to treat me as a human being was not only wrong, but dangerously so. Slavery proved as injurious to her as it did to me” (148) Soon, she lost this trait, and began treating him according to the norms of the time. “Nothing seemed to make her more angry than to see me with a newspaper” (148).
Blacks, at that time, did not even have the freedom to learn to read and know about politics and basic information. It was a luxury reserved only for the white, and only acquired for everyone through suffering, fighting and death.
Although Douglas mistress did not teach him much, he matched the price he needed to pay to learn how to read and write on his own. “I used to also carry bread with me, enough for which was always in the house, and to which I was always welcome; for I was much better off in this regard than many of the poor white children in our neighborhood. This bread I used to bestow upon the hungry little urchins, who, in turn, would give me that more valuable bread of knowledge” (149).
In this case, bread and wit paid for some of Douglas’s freedom. He used bribery to milk information from the minds of the children who were free to learn. Many people today don’t understand how hard those that came before us has to fight to learn to read and write.
Fox said he is amazed at how many people don’t realize that nothing is for free. Most of our society fails to realize that the right to learn how to read and write, at one point, did not extend to everyone. People had to work hard for it, put their lives on the line, and often receive violent beatings for merely learning to read. Learning to read was just the beginning of the battle Douglas had to “pay” for his freedom. He also had to learn to write.
When left alone to take care of the children, Douglas would sneak the children’s copy books and teach himself how to write. By doing so, he was putting his life in danger. He used to do this quite often for small periods. Then, he would challenge the young children to a writing match. As the young boys would compete with him, he often learned from them. Douglas gained his freedom of expression, without paying a cent.
The Essay on Read Dahl Biography Children England Writing
Roald Dahl was born on September 13, 1916, in Llandaff, South Wales, to Norwegian parents, Harald and Sofie (Hesselberg) Dahl. After graduating from Rept on School in 1933, he went to work for the Shell Oil Company of East Africa until World War II started in 1939. He then served in the Royal Air Force as a fighter pilot and he became a Wing Commander. In 1940 Dahl's plane was hit by a machine gun ...
He did however, invest millions of worries, hundreds of hours, and thousands of plans. Douglas gained his last freedom by escaping slavery. In order to have the liberty to be his own owner, he had to run away. In previous attempts, he failed and was beaten and tortured severely. Finally, he forged papers, which he used to make a successful escape from Maryland to New York (147).
Nothing he gained was free, he has to fail, be beaten, learn to write, and then devise a life-threatening plan to be able to have the most basic of freedoms.
During his time, it wasn’t a right, it was a privilege he was legally denied. New generations seem to have forgotten that high costs were stapled to the back of liberty. We think that basic human rights is something that everyone should have immediately. Some believe that these rights should be imposed as early as conception. People sometimes forget that although we are now only paying “maintenance fees,” our ancestors had to buy it with the currency they had.
In order for all of us to enjoy the same civil rights, people before us had to suffer without them. Like Fox said, “many fools just don’t get that.” Today, many Americans still believe we are fighting for freedom in our country. We still fight for freedom of expression, freedom from segregation, and freedom to be who we are. Jaime Fox did say that nothing in this world is free. He was right. No one can feed a person for free because it will impose a cost on someone else.
The funny thing is, that even the things that don’t cost anything to give to someone.
