Don't give; charity is evil
Cayley, if you are ever in the position to sell water for $7 a gallon I want you to charge $7 a gallon [...] it’s your social responsibility to get that water to those who need it most desperately, and if you charge less than the market will bear then the wrong people will claim the water. (Steven E. Landsburg, Fair Play)
Many free market supporters, maybe even most, when asked about the fate of people "who cannot afford", answer that these people may have a recourse to charity, that is to other people's goodwilled donations. Yet, this is almost as evil as socialism. Maybe, because of its deceptiveness, even more evil.
Evil? Deceptive? Is giving really evil? Well, yes, it is. The issue here is that goods and services are always scarce. If someone gives their property or services away to a charity instead of selling them at a market price, one is effectively denying the thing to someone who has worked hard to afford it and giving it to a person who did not. In short; in the real life things are not that simple, rarely is the item the last one in the world, market price is varying and so on.
Yet, it's still evil. What one does by giving is distorting the market. A single gift from a single person may not look that harmful, but when multiplied by the thousands, it's getting worse. Not least because we are not really seeing it. After all, if you had, say a used laptop worth $200 and two people came up, one saying I didn't work a single hour, so be good and charitable and give me this laptop thing for free and the other I worked hard, saved up $200, please sell me this laptop of yours it would be obvious which is the really good thing to do.
Charities use a kind of moral blackmail, telling that they are giving to people in need, to the poor, to the victims and so on, thus bullying innumerable people into giving them things and thus denying them to people that really deserve them. So it's not just socialism by another name, it's also deceptive as it plays on human goodwill. But no goodwill it is, the real goodwill is to follow the market.
That which is given away by the rightful owners was never for sale.
That's the point here. By giving away instead of selling what has a market value one denies the thing (or at the very least contributes to the thing's price growth) to people who worked hard to get it and gives it to people who did not.
I am not questioning the owner's right to do it, but morality of the action. Whether every immoral action should be also illegal is another question.
You are missing the point. It was not on the market in the first place. You can't impose rules about other people's property or you are presuming to be the owner of the property. There can be longer-range issues at play, like for example that wealth is a network phenomenon, poor people are much more likely to become criminals. And in saying that, I am not condoning it, the people who are poor and revert to theft to meet their basic wants are not moral actors, any more than a big player robbing a bunch of trusting clients. But I can't become rich without customers, and neither can anyone. Humans are wired to in part seek the interests of the group as part of their securing their own position.
Ignoring this leads you to the dog eat dog tyrannical power structure.
The point here is that the owner of the thing has to make a choice between some alternatives: put for sale, give away, keep in a closet and so on. And further, that the most morally and socially beneficent alternative is to put for sale.