Idiots who think they can get "something for nothing" or "for free"

A quick way to gauge how well another person understands reality is to ask the following question:

Do you think you can get "something for nothing" or "for free"?

If you answer "yes" to this question, you are an absolute idiot, and you are easy prey for con artists and liars of all stripes. One of the oldest and easiest scams is to promise "something for nothing". Lying politicians promise "free" healthcare, education, and housing and dupe gullible people into voting for them. Con artists promise "free" energy devices or penny stocks (which are close to free) for promises of large returns later on.

"Something for nothing" or "for free" is always one of two things:

1. An outright scam, or

2. Not what it appears to be.

This is true whether or not the promise of "something for nothing" appears in politics, with socialist parasites promising education, healthcare, etc. "for free", or whether it appears in crackpot websites promising "free energy" devices, or anywhere else. The "something for nothing" misunderstanding even rears its ugly head in physics, where misguided people claim quantum mechanics allows one to "borrow" energy from the vacuum "for free" as long as one "pays it back" within a short time. This is total misunderstanding of the time-energy uncertainty relationship. There is nothing in physics that allows one to get energy for nothing, even for a short time.

Even worse, some even claim that one can get a universe from absolutely nothing! This, too, is not what it appears to be, for while it may be possible for a quantum fluctuation to produce a universe, this is not getting "something from nothing". Nothing is that which lacks all properties - if it could produce anything with properties (that is, something), then nothing would have a property, namely it could produce something with properties. But this is self-refuting - nothing cannot lack all properties but also have a property. Hence, nothing cannot produce anything.

A quantum vacuum is not "nothing", because such a vacuum has properties that can be measured, studied and discussed. The time-energy uncertainty relation that some misinformed people think allows one to temporarily violate the first law in fact allows no such thing. Rather, this principle puts bounds on how quickly the energy of a quantum system can change with time.

Philosophically, physically, economically and politically, there is no "something for nothing" or "for free". Anyone who says otherwise is trying to outright scam you, or they've been duped themselves.