It depends on how it's free and the consequences of not having it, imo. Virtually nothing is truly free in a "costs no effort/resources for humans to make usable" sense after all, so making something free really just means that the thing is subsidized in some way. That isnt necessarily bad. If the the thing is vital to have, it might make sense to spread the cost of acquiring that thing for those who cant afford it among the people that can afford to pay the extra cost (for example, things like programs that provide free food to starving people), both because of the obvious ethical reasons and because desperate people will resort to desperate measures to survive that often cause damage far in excess of the cost of that thing, that society must then pay to deal with anyway (for example, various kinds of theft).

On the opposite end, if a thing is simply impractical to charge a proportionate amount for, such as when a single person uses a very small but nonzero amount of a shared infrastructure, it might cost too much to actually figure out how to make people pay a fair percentage and make more sense to just have society subsidize the costs and recoup them from everyone without considering usage (for example, a person sitting on a bench on city property technically causes some cost in maintenance and installation of the bench, but making someone pay to sit on one is impractical, so it makes sense to make it taxpayer funded and subsidized even if for example, it might not be "fair" if the sitter is from out of town and not paying that tax).

However, you can have a situation where making something free actually just means that people that don't have a stake in that thing are paying a significant cost for other people's usage, and those users are incentivized to use it inefficiently because they dont pay for it, making everyone else poorer on average. For example, if you were to make gasoline free for everyone, then driving a more fuel efficient car, or none at all, doesn't significantly reduce your cost, so people drive less efficient ones and don't have as much reason to avoid driving, making the cost of the subsidy higher per person than if you just had everyone pay for their own fuel, and thus doing this would make everyone (except the oil company) poorer with limited actual benefit.

In general, id think these things even out into something like "necessities and public infrastructure should be as free as possible, while luxuries and non-essential personal property should not be"