Everyone knows there’s no such thing as a free lunch. All the same Colorado voters will be tested this fall if they know that.

Expectations are that modern, middle-class Coloradans will deny the “no such thing as a free lunch” truism. They will likely double-down on buying their kids “free school lunch,” with other people’s money, without acknowledging what depraved values they are modeling for their children in the process.

Statewide referred measures LL and MM allow the state to keep excess tax revenue from our sputtering, over-budget new “free school lunch” program and increase taxes on families who make more than $300,000.

Yes, this issue has tax and fiscal repercussions, but really this election is a morality play: who are we and what do we value. The election tests our willingness to act on our class envy.

Do we support taking even more money from people we’re jealous of and giving it to, not the neediest, but ourselves — the middle-class families more than able to buy Johnny his own lunchroom sandwich.

This election is a precise proxy vote, a barometer on our tolerance of class resentment, nannyism and central planning.

There was a time when proud middle-class families wouldn’t dream of taking a handout to buy their kids a meal or really much of anything. And the thought of that money coming only from your neighbor in the nicer house would have been even more repugnant. “What, do they think we are incapable of paying for our kids’ lunch?! Do they think we can’t make good decisions on what to feed our kid? Are we wards of the state now?!”

Of course, those were our values before we turned our state into a progressive paradise. That was then. Today our learned resentment of the “wealthy” who oppress us tempts us to find some way to get even.

Forcing them to buy our kids a “free” meal is the collectivist version of keying their car. It won’t break them, but it’ll cost them. And oh, they’ll know somebody hates them, but they won’t exactly know who.

Full tummies are needed for learning. We all agree providing free lunch for kids of poorer families is an important part of our social safety net. It’s what we used to do, and we all chipped in.

There might even be an argument to increase the number of families eligible for free or reduced lunch. Fine. Let’s all share the cost proportionately and increase the number of families who can participate.

But that’s not what we did. We passed Prop FF in 2022 to celebrate class warfare and force rich families to buy meals for just slightly less rich families. Economists, since they can’t converse with actual humans, call it a “moral hazard.” We can just call it perverse.

This election is an opportunity to observe our greater societal beliefs in a petri dish.

Put aside the big concerns that will eventually cripple and destroy our republic: endless debt spending, printing fiat money, unfunded entitlements like Social Security and Medicare. Referenda LL and MM places Alexander Fraser Tyler’s argument that democracy is bound to fail under a microscope. “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury.”

There are more pedestrian reasons to vote against these festering measures. It rewards the incompetence of those who design and run the system. They couldn’t even run it for a year without it going bankrupt and needing to be bailed out. The original ballot question promised to locally source food for schools. Hah! Never happened.

What kind of idiots are we if we think they won’t be coming back for more and more money?

And what of the creeping way it takes from family autonomy? Government elites and not parents decide what our children should and shouldn’t eat. Who’s really being re-educated, kids or parents?

And pardon me for being conspiratorial, but I see our educational system subtly indoctrinating against individualism and open markets.

What was your first experience with property rights and free markets? Maybe when you tried to trade your orange for another kid’s Oreo cookie. Not a problem when the lunchroom looks like a Soviet grocery. Everyone gets the same bland crap.

Jon Caldara is president of the Independence Institute in Denver and hosts “The Devil’s Advocate with Jon Caldara” on Colorado Public Television Channel 12. His column appears Sundays in Colorado Politics.