At the top of my newsfeed Saturday was an article from WTOP (that’s radio for those of you from this century) headlined “Loudoun County schools see a major increase in the number of students unable to pay for school lunches.”

Alarmism always sells, no?

Sharon Willoughby, chief financial officer for Loudoun County Public Schools, is quoted in the article that “our unpaid meal date (I’m pretty sure the intended word was debt) has increased year over year,” and that requests to be included in the Free and Reduced Lunch program are up 180%.

Apparently my employers, who once hired me to teach economics to the youth of its community, did not attend even one day of Econ themselves, for this is what they teach ya in like the first 10 minutes.

Decrease the price of something and more people will buy it. Make the price zero and A LOT more people will.

Frankly I’m surprised it isn’t an infinite percent. Pride is the only thing keeping suckers like me having their kids pay the sticker price at the lunch line.

And the meal debt?

Make debt costless and people will ignore it.

This is like being threatened by a mafia crime boss… who’s six inches tall. If there are no consequences to the “debt,” and it disappears at the end of the year, does it really make a sound? So I can’t get the “fancy” school lunch if I’m in “debt.” Is one of the options caviar? Truffles? Kobe beef? I’ve been in plenty of school cafeterias; it’s all pretty much standard fare.

Here’s a thought.

Go full communist on the thing.

Seriously. I’ve been the most right-wing person in every school I’ve ever been in, and I’m saying here’s a better way to do this. Scrap the line and the money and the “charging” and bookkeeping and everything. Let all those expenses disappear, and just have a big pile of grilled cheese sandwiches or whatever the “basic” lunch is and let kids take whatever they want. How much could this possibly cost? You could even go a little exotic if you wanted to; it’d still be pennies on the dollar compared to everything else in the budget, lunch-related or not. If nothing else you’d erase the stigma and the recordkeeping of who gets a “free” lunch and who doesn’t.

Would people take advantage of this freebie? Sure, that’s the idea. You’d need someone to at least casually monitor whether kids were throwing things out or stuffing them in their pockets, but if that was the worst thing that happened I think we could live with it.

William F. Buckley, patron saint of right-wing opinion the second half of the 20th century, actually proposed something similar in a 1970 article. Replace all federal welfare programs related to eliminating hunger and what would later be called “food insecurity” and instead have grocery stores just give away staple food products in addition to selling their other fancier wares. Buckley (and others) argued it would be much more efficient and overall less expensive to the taxpayer, noting it wouldn’t even be worth trying to catch anyone who was taking the free food that didn’t “need” it (my quotes).

Let’s at least try a little outside-the-lunchbox thinking. If it doesn’t work out I’ll cover everyone’s meal debt at the end of the year…

when it rolls back to zero.