When I was in college at a midwestern university famous for its right-wing economists, the coffee shop in my dorm was called T.A.N.S.T.A.F.L., which stood for “There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.” It was a quotation from Milton Friedman, who I suppose used it to mean that someone–the owners of capital–are the ones paying for what workers, mothers of dependent children, Chilean miners, or whomever are merely taking, as if it were “free.”
Of course, there isn’t any such thing as a free lunch, but it’s not because someone else is paying for it. It’s because someone is working for it. But that’s not what Friedman meant, and it’s not what critics of tuition-free college mean when they dismiss “free college” as a pipe dream. The derisive use of “free” in the TANSTAFL libertarian sense has experienced a revival, especially around the issue of tuition-free, publicly-funded higher education, or to its critics, “free college.”