When the minimum fee (if a fee is even required) was reduced 20-fold from .01 to .0005 (and the exchange value was doubling every month) in May-June 2011, the value of Bitcoin was the same as today. This greatly impacted the economics of Bitcoin as set up by Satoshi - upon examination of any facet of the currency, everything about Bitcoin seems extremely thought out as though it was delivered through divine intervention. Using a similar "value" argument to also allow more small transactions for free doesn't quite hold up. If you really want to send 0.005 today, you can for a 10% fee (Paypal would charge about a 700% fee for someone to receive $0.05 from you). A fee of less than $0.01 to instantly send any amount of money anywhere in the world is pretty reasonable.