No free lunch, or "the cost of free"

Things are offered “free” all the time. But every resource has a cost.

Even in the case of resources that were obtained by an agent who did a negligible amount of work to extract the resource,¹ costs are still implicit in the creation, collection, and consumption of the resource.

Even in a theoretical “minimal cost” resource—for example, sunlight—an opportunity cost exists for both (1) extracting the resource, and (2) coming to depend upon or use the resource at the expense of another option.²

Footnotes §

1. There’s no such thing as energy-free resources. Even if you stumble on a block of coal, you still have to pick it up, move it, store it, start a fire, tend the fire, deal with the smoke (aka “have infrastructure to consume it”, also a part of the TCO), and so on. So, even something that comes to you through no effort on your part still exacts a cost upon you as you extract value from it. ↩

2. Once you use a resource, you are creating a precedent. Most resources require work to consume (e.g., food, coal, sunlight), and extract a cost in the form of wear and tear on the system used to consume them. In the theoretical limit of a resource that does not extract such a cost, there is still a cost imposed on the system consuming the resource, due to the alignment required of the system to the structure and nature of the resource extraction process. E.g., To extract electricity, you have to hook up wires to electrodes (or the poles of a motor, or whatever). The larger the scale, the more effort required to do the “hook up” — you’ll have to involve safety mechanisms, step functions to handle a smaller, discrete flow of consumption (e.g., chopping up and freezing portions of a cow for later consumption), and infrastructure or adjustments in scheduling to handle the value extracted from the resource. All of this imposes costs on the consuming system. ↩