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This sounds a lot like the Net Neutrality argument: All content should be treated as equal, whether it's pay or not, whether it's powered or supplied by the search engine/ISP or not.

Is there harm in ranking good content appropriately high (if relevant to the search) if it's clear that there is a cost to access it? Could Google just sigil "paid content" with a $ or € or whatnot?

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It depends on what you mean by 'content'. If content is what non subscribers see, then the content would be low quality.

Maybe but that means the search engine had access to the article's contents "for free" and therefore has a copy of that content in its index. If I am not also able to access that content the same way the search engine does (aka ... for free as an anonymous or not-logged-in user), that makes it a lot less appealing.

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