What is a 'Free Lunch"?

Generally, it is a benefit (usually huuuge), wherein a person gets tons of money from the federal government (or any municipality) to perform a task that is worthless,..., or actually detrimental to society.

Here is an example:
My once favorite sporting goods store, Cabellas, gets many millions of tax dollars to build a store, with the understanding that the store will create jobs in excess of what would be created or maintained by local sporting goods businesses.

Seems fair, does it not?

However, these Cabellas locations ALWAYS result in a net loss of community jobs because they drop their prices so low that the local sporting good stores cannot compete, and then have to go out of business (costing jobs). Now, one would assume that those jobs would end up at Cabellas, but in every single case, the number of jobs created by Cabells is significantly lower than the number of jobs lost by local sporting goos stores.
THE RESULT - a net loss of jobs.

Now, one would thinkk of this as normal at capitalism work. However, the tax dollars used to build a Cabellas comes from those local sporting goods stores. So in essence, the local stores are building their own competition, thus paying to be driven out of business. What sense does that make?

Cabellas, like so many other big box stores (Walmart, Lowes, etc.) get paid by us to build their stores, all the while causing a net loss in jobs and higher local tax rates.

This really stinks because I used to like going to Cabellas.

Never again...

-Vic


P.S. One of the other benefits that these big box stores include in their agreements to build a store is that they get to keep the sales taxes and that they get to write-off all expenses for employees (including their benefits) - which means that we build them for free, we pay alll of the wages, they cost our communities jobs, and the jobs that they provide pay less per hour than the jobs that they eliminated from the community.