One of the basic principles of economics is that there is no such thing as a free lunch. Nothing is truly free, because even if something has no monetary cost, the time it takes to acquire or consume the thing is time you can’t spending doing something else.

People seduced by modern monetary theory (MMT) over the last decade and a half should be realizing that their promised free lunch is not truly free. MMT basically says that governments can print all the money they want without having any ...