FREE-CRICKET CORBYN. WILLIAM WATSON,

William Watson

With a week left to the U. K.’s Dec. 12 election, polls show Boris Johnson’s Conservatives maintaining a comfortable lead over Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, 45- 33, 45- 32, or 45- 35, depending on which you believe. Of course, with a day left before the 2017 election most polls also had the Conservatives comfortably ahead and yet Theresa May ended up losing her majority and entering two years of Brexit purgatory — or maybe it was more like Brexit Hell. There’s also the unpredictability of the first- past- the- post system. Raw popularity estimates may or may not catch that.

So it’s not outside the realm of possibility that Labour wins. “Nightmare on Downing Street: Friday the 13th” is the headline this week above analysis of that outcome in the Tory- supporting Spectator magazine. Labour’s election platform, its “manifesto,” as it calls it, “for the many, not the few,” would be the playbook for a Labour government and maybe also, if Labour does better than currently expected, for Left parties around the world, including here.

What jumps off the manifesto’s pages — 35 of them, in fact — is the word “free.” The first use, by Corbyn in an introduction, is rhetorical: “The big polluters, financial speculators and corporate tax-dodgers have had a free ride for too long.” But most of the others are with reference to the proposed new price of many public services: zero. Corbyn uses it six times in his intro, highlighting “full- fibre broadband free to everybody in every home in our country,” “free university tuition with no fees,” “free lifelong learning, giving you the chance to re-skill throughout your life,” “free prescriptions for all” from the National Health Service, “free basic dentistry,” and “free personal care for older people.”

The rest of the document provides details: “free annual NHS dental checkups,” “free bus travel for under25s,” “free hospital parking for patients, staff and visitors,”

HAVE HAD ENOUGH EXPERIENCE WITH ‘FREE’ PUBLIC SERVICES TO KNOW BETTER. NOTHING IS TRULY FREE. EVERYTHING COSTS SOMETHING.

“free personal care, beginning with … older people, with the ambition to extend this provision to all working- age adults,” “free education for everyone throughout their lives,” “free preschool education,” “free school meals for all primary school children,” “free support and advice ( from a new Business Development Agency) on how to launch, manage and grow a business,” “free entry to museums,” “free TV licences for over-75s,” and “free bus passes” for pensioners.

My favourite of all, however, is: “we will add the … Cricket World Cup to the list of crown jewel sporting events that are broadcast free- to- air.” At the moment, legislation provides that certain “crown jewel” events — the Olympics, soccer’s World Cup and FA Cup Final, Wimbledon finals, Rugby World Cup finals and so on — must be offered to free-to-air broadcasters at fair and reasonable costs. Labour will add cricket to the list. Not being a cricket fan, I’m not quite sure whether that says more about Labour moving upmarket or cricket moving down.

Debate about such proposals often devolves to largely fact-free discussions of cost, as if the principle were entirely agreed that providing things free is always best, it’s only a dreary question of what is affordable at the moment and what isn’t.

But by now we in the rich countries have had enough experience with “free” public services to know better. Nothing is truly free. Everything costs something. What “free” actually means is: distributed at a price of zero. But when their price is zero, services are oversubscribed. Governments can either increase supply to whatever demand is at the price of zero. Or — what they inevitably do — they can ration the service in the face of excessive demand, usually by making people wait. The effective price of the service then becomes the value of the time people spend waiting for it, which varies from person to person, lower for people who don’t have many alternative activities, higher for those who do.

But it doesn’t stop there. How is the amount provided decided? Long experience tells us it’s decided politically, by legislators and bureaucrats, whose job is to allocate limited public revenues among unlimited demands for them. Being “fair” about who gets how much requires centralization of service delivery: the minister has the final say.

But with the minister in charge, the service has to all intents and purposes become a public monopoly. As honey pots attract bees, public monopolies attract unions. Increasingly, the purpose of the service is to provide well- paying, hermetically secure jobs, not services for people. When customers buy things in competitive markets companies either hop to it or go belly up. Hopping to it is not a phrase many Canadians would use to describe our public monopolies’ attentiveness to our needs.

We have been down this road many times before. We are richer and better educated and therefore, you would think, potentially more self- reliant than we were 20 or 50 or 100 years ago. Yet our default social evolution seems to be to provide more and more goods and services from outside markets, via public monopolies run by administrative fiat.

U. K. Conservatives are hardly Hayekian radicals. But Lord help the Western world if free-cricket Corbyn gets in.