The death of Aaron Swartz, who was being aggressively prosecuted for illegally downloading articles from JSTOR has brought some worthwhile attention to the costs of academic journals.
In general, I'm not too amenable to the "content is meant to be free" argument. A lot of people and businesses are motivated by financial incentives to produce and distribute content. Still more people just want to be paid for the work that they love to do. Protection of financial incentives for the purpose of encouraging technological and cultural innovation is the historical reason for intellectual property protection -- which is one of the few specific legislative responsibilities addressed in the U.S. Constitution. None of this is to suggest that patent and copyright laws are perfect as they are now (Yglesias shows here the impact of copyright laws on literary culture), but the bottom line is that if all content were free, we'd have dramatically less rich -- or at least wholly different -- cultural production in this country.
Having said all of that, academic research is one form that could do quite well under a different economic model. Scholars and researchers have motivations for publishing their work beyond immediate economic gains from issue sales, including requirements from their institutions to publish research or a personal interest in developing a profile in their field. This suggests that academic work would continue to be produced and distributed without high-price journals. The facts that much good could come from wider public distribution of research and that much of this research is publicly subsidized through grants or through university salaries suggest that moving beyond the current model would also be more equitable and provide greater public benefits.
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