“You can’t get something for nothing.”
“Somebody has to pay.”
People recite these sayings with confidence, as though they were quoting Newton’s Laws of Motion.
But history has shown: you often can get something for basically nothing.
And even when somebody has to pay, that somebody doesn’t have to be you, and the amount doesn’t have to be very much at all.
In some cases, the benefits so vastly outweigh the costs that it is — for all practical intents and purposes — a free lunch.
How we eradicated Polio from the face of the Earth
