[lpetrich]

Something from 5 1/2 years ago, but very relevant here:

Ed Brayton: Free Lemonade: What's Wrong With America : Dispatches from the Culture Wars
noting There is no 'free' lemonade :: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: Terry Savage (her home page)
subtitled "In giving drink away, girls ignore rules of economics -- and sum up what's wrong with U.S."

The three young girls -- under the watchful eye of a nanny, sitting on the grass with them -- explained that they had regular lemonade, raspberry lemonade, and small chocolate candy bars.

Then my brother asked how much each item cost.

"Oh, no," they replied in unison, "they're all free!"

I sat in the back seat in shock. Free? My brother questioned them again: "But you have to charge something? What should I pay for a lemonade? I'm really thirsty!"

His fiancee smiled and commented, "Isn't that cute. They have the spirit of giving."

That really set me off, as my regular readers can imagine.

"No!" I exclaimed from the back seat. "That's not the spirit of giving. You can only really give when you give something you own. They're giving away their parents' things -- the lemonade, cups, candy. It's not theirs to give."

I pushed the button to roll down the window and stuck my head out to set them straight.

"You must charge something for the lemonade," I explained. "That's the whole point of a lemonade stand. You figure out your costs -- how much the lemonade costs, and the cups -- and then you charge a little more than what it costs you, so you can make money. Then you can buy more stuff, and make more lemonade, and sell it and make more money."

I was confident I had explained it clearly. Until my brother, breaking the tension, ordered a raspberry lemonade. As they handed it to him, he again asked: "So how much is it?"

And the girls once again replied: "It's free!" And the nanny looked on contentedly.

She then whined about how Americans expect lots of freebies from their government.

Among Ed Brayton's commenters, Dr. X noted about her that

Terry Savage is a longtime Chicago financial reporter popular with local Libertarians. She was also the first female trader at the CBOE. Though I'm not shocked that she would hold such a view, I am surprised she would behave as she did and write about it. This is a typical Chicago trader attitude, but Savage's manners are usually better than the typical (think Rick Santelli) trader.

lynxreign noted

I certainly hope she paid her brother for that free car ride. Gas, maintenance, time of the driver. Damn commie, sitting in the back seat being chauffered around town to yell at children.

Sounds like a real life episode of Tom the Dancing Bug's Lucky Duck.

She returned a few days later with Giving is great, but lemonade stand should teach entrepreneurship :: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: Terry Savage, where she whined about all the nasty things that people said about her. She claimed that she admired charitable giving, which seems extremely unconvincing. It's like a thief claiming "I have the greatest respect for property rights". After whining that charity must be done with money that one had earned, she then returned to her theme that it's necessary to promote entrepreneurship.

Another swipe at her column: ginandtacos.com » Blog Archive » TERRY SAVAGE GETS A FREE FJM TREATMENT

But someone made a remarkable discovery. Checking at Netcraft, her site is hosted by a server running Linux and Apache. Perhaps her next column will be on the evils of open-source software, on how it is a Communist plot to destroy the commercial-software business with predatory pricing. She could point out that Linus Torvalds had developed Linux right next to the former Soviet Union, meaning that he could easily have been recruited by the KGB.