Meaning
Nothing is genuinely cost-free; anything given away is paid for by someone, somehow, whether through higher prices, taxes, trade-offs, or hidden obligations. A staple of economics for expressing opportunity cost, and often shortened in business and political talk to a wry 'no free lunch'. Conversational to economic jargon; carries a worldly, no-nonsense tone. Regional use: General English; originated in American usage.
Origin
The literal free lunch was an American saloon institution of the mid and late nineteenth century: food laid on for anyone buying drinks, advertised as early as a Milwaukee 'free lunch every day at 11 o'clock' in 1850, and deliberately salty so it sold more beer; contemporaries joked that the free lunch was one of the most expensive things in town. The figurative saying grew out of that practice. The earliest documented wording now traced is Herman Fetzer's column in the Cleveland Press of 4 May 1933, closing a fable with 'There is no such thing as free lunch', and Walter Morrow's 1938 rewrite gave the 'ain't' version. A burst of appearances in 1942-43, traced by the Phrase Finder, answered Henry Wallace's wartime arguments about public spending, and the acronym TANSTAAFL is on record by October 1949. Robert Heinlein made TANSTAAFL a central theme of The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966), and Milton Friedman's 1975 book of this title fixed the phrase in economic discourse, though Friedman did not coin it and never claimed to.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- TANSTAAFL
- There ain't no such thing as a free lunch
- There is no free lunch
- TINSTAAFL
Usage Examples
- The conference threw in dinner and a hotel room, but the registration fee made it clear there is no such thing as a free lunch.
- Read the fine print on that zero-percent financing offer; there is no such thing as a free lunch.
- Economists keep reminding voters that every subsidy is paid by someone, since there is no such thing as a free lunch.