Water is free. It falls from the sky, runs down the mountains, and pools in the ground beneath your feet. No one invoiced you for the rain.
But if you want it filtered, someone has to build the filter. If you want it bottled, someone has to make the bottle. If you want it cold, someone has to run the refrigerator. And if you want it brought to your door on a silver platter, someone has to carry the platter. The water was free. Everything that made it useful to you cost someone something.
That's the problem with every promise of "free." Free internet, free healthcare, free college. Cables, towers, clinics and classrooms don't build themselves, and the people who run them don't work for nothing. "Free" never means no one pays. It means someone else pays.
There are only two ways someone else pays. Either they choose to give it, or it's taken from them. Scripture calls the first one charity: "Each one must give as he has decided in his heart, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver" (2 Corinthians 9:7). Scripture calls the second one theft: "You shall not steal" (Exodus 20:15). Putting it to a vote doesn't change which one it is.
That's why every demand for freebies ends up being a call for slavery. If I have a right to the fruit of your labor without your consent, then you work for me whether you agree or not. That isn't generosity. That's ownership.
And whoever pays gets a say. "The rich rules over the poor, and the borrower is the slave of the lender" (Proverbs 22:7). The hand that pays for your water decides what's in it, how it reaches you, whether in bottles, copper pipes, or lead pipes, and whether you get any at all. Free internet paid for by someone else is internet controlled by someone else. The gift becomes a leash.
There is one thing that is truly free. "Come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and he who has no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price" (Isaiah 55:1). God pays for that Himself, and takes from no one to give it.
Everything else has a price. The only question is whether it's paid freely or taken by force.