When people buy apples it is considered absolutely normal that apples go bad and spoil over time. If your unit of measurement is a golden apple that never rots, then it is only natural that the return on a spoiling apple is negative.
The moment people talk and think about money, they consider the mere concept of a negative return as some kind of monstrosity going against nature itself, despite the fact that money is a claim on labor and labor spoils just like an apple. The saver expects a reward for idleness, while the laborer without a job is getting punished by his enforced idleness. Money without negative return obligates men to become golden statues that never age, a world view that is obviously in dissonance with nature and reality.
Whenever the economy isn't growing, people will prefer an asset that bears a 0% return at no risk over any real investment.
In other words, there is no such thing as a free market without a monetary reform that allows negative interest rates or simply allows money to expire, the same way people age.
Here is another problem, eternal private landownership has the same problem. Let's assume you have a perpetuity that returns you $1 per year. At a zero interest rate its value is infinite and no, that isn't a problem with the concept of zero interest, the obvious problem is that a perpetuity cannot exist, even the planet itself has a finite lifespan, meaning the value of a single plot of land will only amount to billions of dollars. What's worth more? Money that works according to supply or demand or land that doesn't? Of course people are going to pick land. If landownership was eternal, then owning all of the land on the planet is equivalent to turning everyone else into illegal aliens that merely have been granted permission to exist on the planet and whose permission can be withdrawn at any time.
In the face of these two forces there cannot be something like a free market. It would always be a coercive market in one form or another.