ABSTRACT
When Milton Friedman claims that ‘there is no such thing as a free lunch’, he echoes Antoine Lavoisier, the eighteenth-century French tax-farmer-cumchemist who invented the Law of Conservation of Matter. Burnt carbon produces a new substance – carbon dioxide – but according to Lavoisier there was nothing miraculous about this transformation. The reaction can be achieved only by adding oxygen to the carbon. And when the combustion takes place in a sealed container, the new substance has a mass equal that of its ingredients. Your lunch always has to come from somewhere.
