These people are our future

[Lyric]

My answer is above in bold. If the top 5% richest people, who own roughly 90% of the wealth, donated 50% of their wealth to charity, there would be no hunger, preventable diseases or suffering.

So you're telling me that money can buy food, health etc, and that creates happiness. Does money buy happiness or not?!

But they don't do it do they, so I feel it's pointless to posit what the system "can" theoretically do. It's a "free" market, so it doesn't do anything its individuals won't, and if they don't give a toss about their brethren born into poor families, nothing will happen. There is nothing stopping charity now, why would there be any more of it? There are known mechanism that work towards wealth condensation at the top, and studies that show the richest are the stingiest donors, maybe that's why they are the richest in the first place.

If one man gives away one metric ton of salt but has creates ten tons, and another gives away a gram when he only has two grams, the charity of the man who gave away a ton of salt is more beneficial to society. Period, percentage numbers are not relevant!

I don't think it requires much imagination to figure out that more is more. Could you give some mathematics or theory to back up your claim of 3500% greater profits under a free market economy? I was already being rather generous allowing for a gross 15% raise, which I think is still far too great a number.

We start with an island where everyone pulls 10 grams of salt from the ocean per year. A smart man invents a harvesting method that pulls 2,000 grams per year. He trades salt at one fish per ten grams of salt. Suddenly everyone who has a fish has 20 grams of salt per year, and the smart man has 1,000 grams left in his hut. Stop thinking of wealth as if no new wealth can be created. If you still think new wealth cannot enter the world, let's talk about that before the more complex issues.

You introduced the fishing as means for the other islanders not smart enough for salt gathering to trade for it.

Primitive people catch fish without nets. Some literally catch fish in their teeth, others use a sharp stick to spear them, others put poisons in shallow pools to stun the fish. Catfish are still caught with bare hands in the American south.

Better perhaps, but is it optimal? I can easily think of far better outcomes for the island, we're not arguing whether a free market economy is better than no economy at all, right?

Treating human beings like machines doesn't work. A system that tries to optimize production and distribution, as if humans are parts in a car, has always failed in the past because parts in a car do not have minds and emotions. A system that allows each part in the car to make their own decisions maximizes each part's enjoyment of life. Miraculously, as each part of the car works to better his own life (with restrictions against hurting other machine parts), the entire machine becomes faster and stronger (more salt is pulled from the ocean when everyone is free to keep their harvest).

When one person (or group of people) tries to tell all the other people what to do and direct (force) the people's actions the end result is that people feel controlled and unhappy.

One individual wielding the economic power of 1000 units against the 20 of the others, calling that guy king is not an overstatement. We've had governments since we came up with agriculture, and they've always been led by a small ruling elite. The way the wealthy or anyone else is prohibited from taking anything by force is commonly called laws and their enforcers, without those physical strength becomes the factor that determines prices.

Yes, free societies are not common. The United States two hundred years ago was a rare exception. The founders of the US tried to create a system that explicitly stopped the wealthy from forming a government that uses its power to make the wealthy richer at the common man's expense. The plan failed as each generation forgot what life was like in England and gradually were tricked into allowing regulations (determined by gov't/the wealthy) to degrade the quality of life and funnel money to the top. See my previous post on how regulations funnel money to the top.

A rich man is not a king if he cannot force anyone to do anything. He is only king when he is given the power of government force.

Personally I would add a whole number of other things on your list, including a right for healthcare and basic education, many of the rest I support can loosely be categorized under harming others. I do not consider maximizing the collective output of the system to be important itself, if means for a baseline standard of living are not guaranteed.

There is no way to guarantee anything for all the people unless it is literally free and limitless. Sunlight is not the same as health care or salt. If three men are on an island and and one stops working to get salt, who of them will "guarantee" that the lazy man gets salt? If one man wants to "guarantee" salt for the lazy or the crippled, who does he take it from? If we have laws against stealing no one is allowed to take salt from the man with 1,000 tons of salt or the man with one gram of salt. If we are only allowed to steal from the rich there is less incentive to become rich! If we are all allowed to steal from each other less salt is harvested and more weapons are manufactured instead and we have an arms race instead of a harvesting race. Harvesting races are much better for society.

Health care has to be provided by human work. It isn't infinite or free. We intuitively feel that we should all be happy and healthy, but making drugs and training doctors takes money; it is exactly like salt. Someone has to harvest it. If you let everyone keep their salt and trade it you get more salt and the poor have more salt too. Same for health care. If you let free men train themselves and develop drugs free from regulation and taxes, they create more and more doctors and drugs until they are virtually free.

Out of curiosity, what are your thoughts on the US constitution and the Bill of Rights, are those unnecessary?

They had the right idea -- to create a government that explicitly bans harming others or allowing the wealthy to gain control of the country and use government to make themselves richer with government force (regulations that favor their business).