Yes, there are indeed two costs of production, and free market economics has terms to cover both:
"Sunk costs" and "marginal costs". Free market economics says that the price of a good in a competitive market falls to the marginal cost of production, not to the sunk cost of production.
Read up a bit, I think you can find any number of good college freshman texts on "microeconomics". Then come back and argue.
You did not respond to the substance of my posting, which is echoed in the wikipedia article:
> Public goods provide a very important example of market failure, in which market-like behavior of individual gain-seeking does not produce efficient results. The production of public goods results in positive externalities which are not remunerated. If private organizations don't reap all the benefits of a public good which they have produced, their incentives to produce it voluntarily might be insufficient. Consumers can take advantage of public goods without contributing sufficiently to their creation. This is called the free rider problem, or occasionally, the "easy rider problem" (because consumer's contributions will be small but non-zero).
This theory is, first of all just a theory and second of all from a time before there were products with 0 marginal costs. Sunk costs have to be covered somewhere because if you can never make any money off of the product then why would you invest in creating it?
"Sunk costs" and "marginal costs". Free market economics says that the price of a good in a competitive market falls to the marginal cost of production, not to the sunk cost of production.
Read up a bit, I think you can find any number of good college freshman texts on "microeconomics". Then come back and argue.