David McElroy

As spring comes to most parts of the country, many people are thinking about how to get into shape for the summer. Of course, some people are less eager to get started with the program.

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You might not know Matthew Lesko‘s name, but there’s a good chance you’ve seen or heard one of his ads. He claims to have been researching government grants for more than two decades and he claims to be the expert on “free money for everybody.”

I’ve always found his ads offensive, because there’s something horribly distasteful to me in the idea of “free money.” There’s no such thing as free money. There’s only money that’s been taken from one group of people and given to another group of people — and that’s always seemed very wrong to me.

But I’ve been thinking lately about this issue, and I’m not sure the case is as simple as I’d like it to be. It’s not that I’ve suddenly started approving of governments coercively taking money from people. But the question of what it’s OK for us to accept from government is more complicated — at least for those of us who believe it’s wrong for the money to be available in the first place.

I know a couple who are having a difficult time financially right now. She’s working full-time while he finishes his college degree. They have a young child, and it’s a struggle to make it financially. But he’s a libertarian who hasn’t been willing to take any government assistance. His in-laws watch them struggle and seem disapproving that he won’t apply for any kind of government aid. Is he a principled man who we should admire? Or is he a fool for not taking the help that’s available?

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You might have noticed hotels and other public places with swimming pools making sudden changes to their facilities lately. They’re adding chair lift devices to pools and hot tubs. These devices can lift someone in a wheelchair from the ground and lower the person into the water.

Have the hotels suddenly discovered that there’s a hot untapped market in catering to people in wheelchairs who are hankering to use swimming pools? Not at all. They’re simply being forced to spend a lot of money to comply with new federal regulations handed down by the Obama administration in the name of the Americans with Disabilities Act. And the new rules might close some pools.

The new rules go into effect today. They cover lots more things than just chair lifts, but that’s one of the more prominent ones. The new lifts cost between $5,000 and $10,000 each. If a hotel has a pool and a hot tub — even side by side — it’s not enough to have one unit that can be moved between the two places. No, the regulations require one for the pool and one for the hot tub, even if nobody uses either one of them. And if a hotel fails to comply, the penalty can be as much as $55,000.

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