[BrenBarn]

> What's wrong with people getting rich by producing goods and services, and selling these to willing buyers?

If you take this sentence and change "people getting rich" to something else (like "fomenting drug addiction" or "polluting the environment"), does anything change? Whether the inequality is a result of "selling goods to willing buyers" is a complete red herring. If that consequence is bad, it doesn't really matter whether it's a result of supposedly "fair" market exchanges.

Others have already pointed out that it's not really plausible to avoid the "different" problems you mention while still allowing unlimited wealth inequality. But aside from that, how do you know that the buyers are willing? What is the set of alternatives being considered to decide if a person is "willingly" choosing a certain product? It's difficult to even maintain the pretense of "willing buyers" in a "free market" when some individuals control a large market share. Miners living in a company town were "willing" to buy groceries from the company store in the sense that they needed to buy groceries, but they didn't really have any other options for how to express their "market preference".

Even if markets were free, there's nothing inherently good about a free market. What's good is a free society, where people in aggregate have substantive freedom to do what makes them happy. That goal isn't furthered by allowing a small number of wealthy people to pursue their goals while a large number of less wealthy people are unable to do so.

[x-complexity]

> If you take this sentence and change "people getting rich" to something else (like "fomenting drug addiction" or "polluting the environment"), does anything change?

False equivalency. It is possible to gain wealth without performing any of the listed/possible negative global effects. Furthermore, it is a backdoor towards injecting ideas of poverty being a morally positive position.

> Even if markets were free, there's nothing inherently good about a free market. What's good is a free society, where people in aggregate have substantive freedom to do what makes them happy.

Having a free society implies the freedom to exchange with each other with minimal restrictions. Not allowing people to do so runs opposite to the ideals of the stated intention.

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All that being said, that *doesn't* mean that the current market's working as intended. What has been inherited is a complex tangled ball of national ideals, personal & corporate persuasions to governments for their own reasons/goals, & consistent global coordination failures when circumstances change.

But the outright banning of markets is equivalent to the banning of hammers, just because hammers are sometimes used to bludgeon people to death. It is ultimately a tool, and a very useful one in terms of signaling demand & supply.

[BrenBarn]

> Having a free society implies the freedom to exchange with each other with minimal restrictions.

I don't think that it implies "with minimal restrictions", any more than it implies the freedom to do anything else with minimal restrictions. In any case, a free society also implies a lot of other freedoms, and insofar as wealth accumulation interferes with those other freedoms, it's not adding to net freedom. An abstract "freedom from market restriction" is not useful if you don't have things like the freedom to eat or the freedom to sleep peacefully.

> Not allowing people to do so runs opposite to the ideals of the stated intention.

Not necessarily. Not allowing anyone to engage in market activity probably does; allowing everyone to engage without restrictions also does. The point is that markets don't have some magical special status as a component of freedom.

> But the outright banning of markets is equivalent to the banning of hammers, just because hammers are sometimes used to bludgeon people to death.

I'm not suggesting banning markets, I'm just saying that the mirror image of your position is also true: elevating markets to some mythical status and insisting that they are the ultimate litmus test of freedom is like saying that because hammers can be used to build houses, everyone must be allowed to use hammers however they please. Markets (just like everything else) are okay when controlled and regulated within their bounded role as a component of society.