Let's take a simple example. You have a village and someone plants an apple tree. Everybody who wants an apple has to pay to the owner (planter). Now let's say (to make it less politically controversial) that the owner dies, and the village decides that anyone in the village can take, say, 10 apples per month.
I would then say the apples are free, wouldn't you? It perfectly fits the definition of the word.
And this is analogous to technological innovation. Someone spent time creating this innovation in the past, and the products of this innovation can be free, you don't have to pay anyone to use it, they are already dead.
So I have shown you, I hope, that free things can appear "out of thin air" in the economy. Then it's just a matter of social consensus how to redistribute the free things, for example, people can decide that they will just work two hours less.
But in this case what happens is that then the population doubles and they decide that now each person can take 15 apples, not only now they have had a 300% increase in apple consumption which puts a stress on the tree, and the left over apples that were used to be sold in order to pay the gardener to take care of the tree are also now gone so your free tree dies and rots away and everyone is sad because there are no more apples.
No matter what economical model you choose there is no such thing as "free" you have a society which can produce X amount of capital that's the pie you have to play with. Over unity doesn't exists in economics anymore that it can exist in nature.
P.S. Even money isn't free to maintain, so even if i drop a bag of money into your lap it will cost you.
And I think your view is too narrow.
> the cost of the apples represented that cost
No, the cost of apples represented how much people wanted them. It had nothing to do with the cost of the tree maintenance. There is no requirement for the person to even maintain the tree - some food actually grows on trees. :-)
When the population doubles the village may decide differently. Your scenario is just one possible option, and that's my point.
> No matter what economical model you choose there is no such thing as "free"
That's not correct. This problem was dealt with very differently in different economic schools. Classicals for example had concept of land and rent (extraction). For them, it could have been "free", or rather, they understood that there is an arrangement in society. Neoclassicals, neokeynesians and austrians pretty much ignore this problem. Marx invented labor theory of value (all value comes from labor) to deal with it, which was quite a good attempt to find a generally acceptable solution (and you even allude to it where you try to claim that maintenance by humans is always required), but is unfortunately inconsistent.
I think the simplest resolution is to simply accept that things (and even ideas) can produce value on their own, without human intervention. This value can then be captured easily by humans, because these things don't protest like humans do. And this capture is not all that different from landowner capturing rent. It's just a matter of laws and customs how the windfalls from capture of the (free) value produced by things is distributed.
You may argue then how any profit should be distributed? Well, I have no idea, and I don't think anyone has, really. Even if you have just two people (say two different specializations) that are both required to produce certain thing, how do you divide profits from the thing? There is no correct answer to that question.
Capitalist's answer is to make one of them owner who decides for both, communist's answer is to divide them equally, democrat's answer is them to take vote, answer from labor theory is inconsistent and paradoxical (if you consider technical innovation in one job, one of them now works less but gets paid as before, which contradicts the assumption that value comes from labor), answer from free market theory is even weirder - that there is no profit to be divided, and answer from practice seems to be that it simply depends on political power of the parties (which may simply translate to bigger stick if you have just two people).
> Even money isn't free to maintain, so even if i drop a bag of money into your lap it will cost you.
This is arguably a different meaning of "free". On level of physics, nothing is really "free", because there is energy and entropy.. But in everyday use of the word "free" we are dealing with values relevant for humans, and they don't entirely map to these physics terms (in fact they often contradict, for example in GDP calculation).
They are still being paid the same (per hour salary was increased) and they had to hire more staff, one of the big pluses they've reported is that it was much easier for them to recruit new employees but that's not something unique considering they've just given everyone a 25% raise by mandating that they should work only 6 hours.
So overall their operational expenses have went up, by how much well hard to say, they've managed to increase their workforce by almost 30% so that's a flat out 30% increase in operational costs, since recruiting and maintaining an employee is considerably more expensive (on boarding process & training costs, more heads means more benefits have to be paid out) than paying overtime then the operational costs have probably even risen more than a flat 30%. This is a government funded experiment and so it the employer so who ended up paying the bill well the Swedish people, at least those who pay into the system since now Sweden has the lowest (actual) pay-in ratio of all countries within the EAA and no much north sea oil and gas to cover for it like their richer neighbor Norway.