alt Hacker NewsFree housing, free food, free health care, and free income are also wildly popular with the US adult population. The problem is that those things are not really "free" because somebody else needs to pay for them.
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You’re confusing free to the user with free to the government. Those are all great examples of things which make huge differences in the lives of the people who need them while having no meaningful impact on taxpayers (forget Jeff Bezos, none of us would significantly change our lives if we paid for childcare or housing out of general fund revenue, and that’s before you factor in how much money we’d save getting better treatment with universal healthcare — every time I’ve done the math comparing us with Denmark, it’s been roughly even once you factor in how much we pay for insurance).
Part of how you can tell it’s not the cost motivating opposition is that this concern is never applied to defense spending.
Yet we apparently have money for military parades and wars and ballrooms. Go figure.
> The problem is that those things are not really "free" because somebody else needs to pay for them.
This line of thinking is exactly why America is sliding backwards.
It is not a problem to pay for things provide a net benefit to society.
On the healthcare front it’s not even a question. We are already paying via insurance and deductibles and copays etc. W2s don’t see most of the cost because their company pays it.
Exactly. Giving people free stuff is extremely popular. If people actually want those things, we can collective open our wallets and pay for it. But that changes people's opinions quite radically.
"Somebody else needs to pay for" warmongering, too, yet there's nowhere near as much hand-wringing about how "somebody else needs to pay for them".
This is such a straw man argument. Consider health care.
The US spends by far the most per-capita on health care of any OECD country [1]. It's roughly 50% more than the number 2 on the list, which is Switzerland, a notoriously expensive country. Yet (almost?) every other country on that list has universal healthcare. Yet life expectancy is lower than Costa Rica [2] and generally health outcomes are worse in the US than most OECD nations.
So providing universal healthcare would actually be cheaper overall but it would destroy a health insurance companies, which are nothing more than parasitic rent-seekers. There would be less spending per capita but a lot of that spending would be made by the government rather than companies. So you'd need to tax to cover that cost, which would be significant, but it would be overall cheaper.
Now consider housing. We treat it as a speculative investment rather than something to provide shelter. There is absolutely no reason for it to be as expensive as it is. All we're doing is a massive wealth transfer from the young and poor to the old and rich. Yet we, as a society, choose to prioritize landlord and speculator profits over people, quite literally, dying in the street.
Food? We produce an abundance of food, more than we can eat. There is absolutely no reason anyone should go hungry in any OECD nation, ever. We destroy food to protect profits.
As for income, people generally want to be paid enough to live on, something that's becomign increasingly difficult. And again, we choose minting billionaires at a stupendous rate (and now trillionaires) over paying people a living wage.
[1]: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2025/11/health-at-a-gla...
[2]: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2025/11/health-at-a-gla...
Better to spend money on helping our neighbors than going around the world murdering people