Oh you’re so smart…
Here’s my attempt to answer your question: Minerals are not free because it costs ISK to get them. Under your quoted conditions, you can gather ORE “for free” from the asteroids, but to get MINERALS you have to pay the reprocessing fee when you use the refinery. Thus, MINERALS are “NOT free to gather” as you put it.
So very smart you are.
Mining is not a faucet. A faucet is anything that directly generates ISK from nowhere case in point NPC bounties or mission bounties whereas sinks are removing ISK from the game i.e. skillbooks. Anything else, mining or PLEX or anything else is just shuffling wealth and ISK already in existence around.
You’ve not specified how they are gathered. As previously stated, you don’t mine minerals, you mine ore, which is then refined into minerals. This has an associated cost, and is therefore not free. You can also “gather” minerals by using a buy order to get them from the market. This is also not free, as there is a broker’s fee, and you’re paying ISK to buy them.
Can I have my billion ISK now? 
Hi
The problem is your use of the concept ‘free’.
If free means - did not purchase on the market or spend isk - then possibly, but I don’t think you can discount purchase cost of equipment as readily as you do.
However this is not the way free is usually used in this context- it usually means ‘without cost’.
Was the blackberry wine I made free, no it had a cost, and part of that cost was the time I spent gathering the blackberries.
I do not have to quantify the cost in currency, dollars, pounds or isks, for it to still be a cost.
If I set up a 6 month LARP tournament, where players had to gather blackberries to make weapons, and blackberry bushes to build tree forts, and they developed an economy selling them to each other (its hard making a fucking weapon from a blackberry and a bit of stick, so some people specialise, they trade their weapons for protection and other goods, cause others are just really good at throwing blackberries) the time spent gathering - as a cost - would be the basis of their economy (we have to assume its a big forest relative to the player count so the blackberries are effectively infinite).
After all, the supply of blackberry weapons (created from an infinite resource as ore in eve) is limited by the number of people making blackberry weapons relative to the ones consuming, and how many blackberry weapons they make and put on the market, each forager has only a finite amount of time so we can see how this cost - time- directly effects market value.
In my example, if someone does not value their time and sees the blackberrys as free, and does not factor that cost into the price, they will not be able to compete with the other players (in this game they either build or fight) as even if they pick as many blackberries as the other builders, they well not be able to afford as much protection.
Also, when the other traders realise they think blackberries are free (thus braking the fourth wall that makes their virtual economy function as an economy), they will probably beat them up or something.
So no minerals are not free,
except in the sense that everything is free when you think about it long enough,
oh money?? irl??
Just gotta gather it, just takes time, I mean I don’t buy money with money, whats the cost. I mean I just go to work and spend my time and they give me free money.
great huh?
So yes your wrong sorry.
Simple.
You ask about how minerals are not free and then talk about access to the asteroid being free. This is not the same thing.
It does not matter if you have free access to the asteroid, to get minerals from it you have to invest time and mine it. The time invested gives value to the minerals.
Now you can still pretend that your time is worthless and therefore minerals are free.
Consider for a moment the following scenario: You mine for an hour into a jetcan. Suddenly I show up and steal all the ore.
Now do you actually think you lost nothing when I stole those minerals because you consider them free, or do you think you lost something of value because of the hour you invested into mining it?
Thanks for the 1bil ISK
If I harvest berries, mushrooms and fish from the Finnish forests and lakes, they cost me no currency.
They are free.
Yet, if you can’t gather those directly and must instead gather something else that can be converted to those at a cost, then they aren’t free.
That’s the situation here. You can’t mine minerals. It’s impossible.
You are placing value on them based upon currency though, as has been mentioned before if someone shows up, whacks you upside the head and steals said resources, would you consider it time well invested? Time is money, and in this case your time has contributed to the value of the items.
I can gather them directly.
If something costs no currency, it is free.
Air costs me nothing. Are you paying for the air you breath?
If you want to go down one of your rabbit holes, then sure, you can gather those directly and they aren’t minerals.
They are, as with many things you post, completely irrelevant to the subject of this thread.
So your analogy switched to a literal aside, you cannot mine minerals directly in EVE. It’s impossible and there is always a cost involved in producing minerals.
I can gather gold in the north of Finland from streams for free.
Gold is a mineral.
Your attempt to somehow single out minerals as different than any other primary source commodity, is false.
If you come across 100 rubies, berries, or pennies somewhere in a field, and you gather them up, are they not free?
Currency is just a centralized item being traded for something else. In order for something to be traded it has to have a value placed on it the value can be anything you have traded for said items be that time, money, other items…nothing is truly free. If you were to go down to the pond and catch a fish, energy was expended as was time time you could have used to earn money to buy the food and water to use the energy to catch the fish…nothing is truly free. Not everything relating to being free relates to money or currency
You can gather ore not minerals. You have to actually refine the ore at a fee which is higher than zero ISK and therefore minerals are not free no matter if you consider the ore to be free.
Finland isn’t EVE.
You post some stupid stuff. Not unexpected when your knowledge of the game is so limited.
Just to add to my completely valid and 1bil ISK worthy answer.
Unlike some miners I value my time and consider the amount of effort I invested into writing this answer 1bil ISK and not “free”. Hence if I don’t get the 1bil ISK within the day I consider this an attempt at stealing and war will be waged until my demands are met.
If its a non-npc refinement facility, you incur no cost.
Refining facilities in Citadel/EC cannot be run for free.
There is always a cost involved.
Its a valid analogy on all pertinent points.
If you are too stupid to grasp that, its your own problem.
If you find 100 rubies, berries or pennies in a field and gather them up, are they not free? Answer.
The refinement process itself incurs no fee.
The cost of the facility or its running are a separate cost, which further may or may not be yours to pay.
Is your knowledge of EVE so limited that you think these things are minerals in the game?
Is you knowledge of the real world so limited that you think berries and pennies are minerals?
Your limited understanding of the game I was aware of. Your limited grasp of real life doesn’t surprise.
Enjoy your stupidity yourself. I’m out, because your dumb off topic discussions are pointless.
Free is not free as soon as there is any cost involved, yours or not. If there is an ISK cost, that is not free.