I think I was projecting how I've been thinking about the employer match which rightly or wrongly I feel has been confirmed with the phrasing of free money and that is considered a benefit as distinguished from salary.
Yup, your post makes more sense now. Your brain just made a word-association without fully grasping the underlying meaning of those words. You saw "free money" as something inferior to "salary", when really, it is meant to be something superior. Here is the ranking of how you should like to accumulate money:
1) Free money: money for which you don't have to perform any labor to obtain
2) Salary money: money you obtain in exchange for your labor.
3) Expensive money: money for which you pay someone else money to obtain (borrow).
If you want to accumulate lots of money, it's clear that the best way is get as much from category #1 as you can. #2 is a decent second option, but why work for it if you don't have to?
"I can understand why you'd want to leave 'salary money' on the table (don't want to work longer hours/have more responsibility), but why leave 'free money' on the table?!"
We do often talk about the perks of our job as different from our salary. And I wonder why.
I guess maybe naive non-Mustachians might talk of it that way. But I think most enlightened Mustachians are informed enough to see through the bullshit smokescreen and understand that "perks" and "benefits" and "salary" are simply different names for things that are a part of your total compensation, and they should all be included when comparing against alternatives (though yeah, I'm kind of surprised how many people in this thread were still keeping them separate).
As you note in your AOL example, people *do* notice when their "perks" or "benefits" are cut, just as they notice when their "salary" is cut. But some of the reason they "accept" it is because even after the reduction, they still cannot find a better total compensation package elsewhere. My 401(k) match was dropped at my old company, and while it was clear and obvious to me that it was a cut in my compensation, it wasn't enough to make me leave the job. And my current company hasn't offered a match since I joined. But the total compensation was sufficient enough that I "accepted" it.