> I don't think you understand how economics work. And I think your view is too narrow. > the cost of the apples represented that cost No, the cost of apple

> I don't think you understand how economics work. 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).