If you are spending your own money on yourself, you care very much how much it costs, and care very much how good what you get is. If you are spending someone else’s money on someone else, aka “free”, you don’t care how much it costs, and you don’t care if it does the recipient good or does him harm.
“What if” has found an interesting example of “free”
Seems that the government budgeted eleven million dollars to provide free interview suits for four hundred job seekers, a cost of a mere thirty thousand dollars per job seeker, which expenditure was considered perfectly reasonable, proper, and legitimate. Ordinarily such a small, reasonable, and modest expenditure would not attract anyone’s attention, even though very nice suits cost only a few hundred. (more…)
