A recent Facebook interaction reminded me of the weirdly common argument that free public services aren’t free because we pay for them with our taxes. This strikes me as very silly pedantry.

When Ben & Jerry’s has Free Cone Day, nobody gets confused and thinks the ice cream and cones are produced and distributed at no cost to Ben & Jerry’s—we all understand that the ice cream is free to the customer at point of sale. The same is true of free public services: they are free at point of sale, not altogether unpaid for. Whether they’re being paid for with tax increases, by cutting other expenses from government budgets, through tariffs or sales of public lands, is completely immaterial to the question of whether they’re free at point of sale, which is what literally everyone means when they talk about free things. To pretend otherwise is to step into an alternate world where Free Cone Day is a misleading and confusing proposition, rather than an intuitively simple concept.

Ben & Jerry’s pays for Free Cone Day with its regular year-round prices, so it’s effectively subsidized by everyone who buys their ice cream. But if I went around insisting that Free Cone Day wasn’t free because regular customers are paying marginally higher prices year-round, people would call me a weird pedant. Which, I mean, yes.