What free air? Don’t waste your breath

There ain’t no such thing as free air! Not compressed air, anyway. But don’t tell that to the politicians in Hempstead.

A battle is brewing there over whether service stations should be allowed to charge for compressed air. Town Supervisor Anthony Santino is backing a law making it illegal to charge for air. Gas station owners and the folks who own and maintain compressed-air vending machines are fighting Santino.

At a public hearing Tuesday, attendees spoke as if the issue were on par with the Iran nuclear deal and threatened federal lawsuits, because . . . it’s Long Island. But they’re not actually arguing over whether the air should be free. They’re arguing over how the air should be paid for, and by whom. Because no matter what the politicians in Hempstead or Washington tell you, pretty much nothing is free.

This is the huge deception that so frequently dumbs down our politics. No matter how much we might wish it to be so, public universities cannot be free. Health care cannot be free. Food and shelter cannot be free. Even broadcast TV programming cannot be free. They can be paid for by a person other than the consumer, or by a method other than direct payment from the consumer. But they can’t be free. And when we change the way we pay for goods and services, we change the goods and services themselves.

Air compressors and electricity cost money. Business owners who dispense compressed air need to make that money. So if Hempstead makes it illegal to charge for that service, then the Red Bull price or the gas price or the tire price has to go up a bit.

Now we might all agree that’s worthwhile. I’m a guy who generally owns bald, slowly leaking tires and rarely has rolls of quarters. I’d probably rather pay for my compressed air by seeing my $16.09 worth of sodas, Slim Jims and items with the word Cheez in them bumped up to $16.14. That would make buying air more convenient. But not free.

And the change in how we pay would probably change the experience of getting air. If companies make their compressed-air money by getting us to put quarters in machines, they have an incentive to make sure the machines work. Some of us will continue to stupidly, repeatedly stuff quarters into broken machines, but we’re too much the exception to anchor a business model. The station is now making its air money from the sale of aging heat lamp taquitos, not the air machine, so it makes the money whether or not the machine works. Who will really care if it’s broken for a month?

Likewise, if you change how we fund state universities, health care, food, clothing or shelter, you’ll likely change the quality and delivery of the goods and services. The best way to guarantee quality goods and services, proper pricing and appropriate consumption is to make consumers pay the tab themselves. If the quality or price are off, they won’t.

It’s reasonable to have a conversation about the idea that payment of tuition to state universities by students is not the best way to fund the universities, and we’d rather do it through taxes. We certainly can talk about changing how we fund health care and food, clothing and shelter — and air.

But we should never say anyone has a “right” to such things. To claim a right to a good or service produced by another person is to claim that person’s labor, which is slavery. We should never say anything is free. It all costs someone something. And we should remember that when we try to make things look free by getting away from having the consumer pay, the costs might skyrocket and the quality decline.

Lane Filler is a member of Newsday’s editorial board.