Even though God speaks directly to you through this column, there is always room for interpretation.

For instance, every time I point out that there’s no such thing as a “free lunch,” someone invariably buys me lunch.

Of course, economic theory suggests that my free lunch isn’t really free; the money expended by someone to feed me could have been used to establish a charity to sustain impoverished columnists who write for stingy business newspapers.

And so it was last month when Boston officials and other civic hangers-on got all huffy when they learned that the “free” tickets for city families to ice skate at Fenway Park were being scalped for hundreds of dollars apiece.

As Mayor Menino’s spokeswoman put it, the free tickets were intended to be given away to city residents, so residents could skate for free. In case you missed her point, the tickets were free. Unlike lunch. Because there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

Of course, unless you’re very high up in the Obama administration, you understand that nothing is really free; that money must be taken from someone or something to pay for ice skating maintenance and promotion and police.

The ice skating “investment,” as government likes to say, was worth the cost, because lots of locals would enjoy ice skating on the sacred ground where Ted Williams hit home runs.

And there it is again. If there is demand, and if the supply presumably is less than the demand (in a “free” kind of a way), then the market will rise up like the mighty hand of God and unleash scalpers to make everything all better.

The ice skating tickets were gobbled up as fast as a Fenway Frank – and it was at that point the scalpers began peddling what was no longer “free.”

No Sunny Outlook

Sun Life Financial, which could choose to give away financial services for free, but, instead, charges for them, was involved in the benevolent skating ticket giveaway project. A company spokesman said the company did not “condone” the selling of tickets that were intended to be free.

The short-term grumpiness over scalpers disrupting the Fenway fun is a micro incident in the macro world of supply and demand and the shadowy middlemen who make it all work.

Anti-scalping laws and ordinances pop up across the land, fueled by rhetoric about how unfair it is that little Dick and Jane have been priced out of the rock concert of their dreams, because the $50 ticket available at 9 a.m. has been transformed into a $200 ticket by 9:15.

With the possible exception of those local ordinances that prohibit boys from wearing baggy, low-cut pants in public, prohibitions on reselling of tickets seems the most excessively muscular prohibition on the part of governments that should concern themselves with locking up criminals and plowing the snowy streets.

Neither the Constitution nor the Bible promises us tickets at a particular price. We are promised the “pursuit of happiness,” but even happiness can have a resale value.

In a 1927 U.S. Supreme Court decision to which no one pays much attention, the justices sort of mumbled that the resale of theatre tickets wasn’t of sufficient “public interest” to justify government mucking around in the business of scalping. It’s an old case. Those old-coot judges never downloaded a cool song or threw their panties at someone on stage.

To be sure, the war against – and distaste for – scalping is more political than law-based. Who among us will march in the streets in defense of the scalpers?

The core problem is the difficulty of determining exactly what a “fair” price might be for access to the Red Sox or Patriots or Boston Symphony doing a Rolling Stones retrospective. If market mechanisms aren’t allowed to function, which arm of government will decide what Hannah Montana is worth on a Saturday night?

Government has reveled in the great fun of setting “minimum prices” for such things as dairy products and tobacco and alcohol – and real estate professionals have keeled over dead from the horror of mandated “market-rate” housing that defers to nothing resembling a market.

The ticket scalpers don’t need any government direction. They aren’t lovable, but they aren’t stupid, either.