As for socialist Utopian "Saint" Sir Thomas Moore, well, he would certainly know about the expendability of human beings, wouldn't he? Or do you think the man who tortured and burned human beings alive was all sweetness and light, like the fictional character in Robert Bolt's play?
As a critique of the social effects of capitalism, socialism has always had something truthful to say.
Its critique -- like the Pope's -- is nonsense, laying the problems of the poor at the feet of free markets. The problem of poverty has been widely studied. Many of the people classified as "poor" in this country are poor by their own choices, and capitalism has exactly nothing to do with it. The Church, like socialists, has always known indigent people nursing fantasy resentments are an easy mark for demagogues and they have gone at advancing them with great gusto. For the genuinely poor, there is charity and guess which economic system produces (overwhelmingly) the most of that? It sure as hell isn't the "system" with "something truthful" to say.
It is nonsense to speak of “free” markets,” There are only “markets.” Go back to Smith and read what he said, remembering that he was not an “economist” but a moral philosopher, and “The Wealth of Nations,” does not, as “Kapital ” does, reduce the tangible things of life to numerical abstractions. He is simply not even an empiricist. In his world the “shop,” a group of human beings trying to produce objects for sale, is what is economically most important.
You seem obsessed with the word “socialist.” The thing was even invented until the 1820, To use it to apply to anything before that time, is to create an anachronism, a distortion. Like using the world “liberal” to speak of a Whig like Burke, or even a radical like Paine. More was not a socialist but he was the king’s minister. In life he was both like the man in Bolt’s play and a very different person. It is a work of fiction, just as any biology is inevitably a work of fiction.
But yes, the problems of the poor can be “laid at the feet of the markets because markets are indifferent to poverty. They don’t exist to end poverty. The merchant worries about the poverty of himself and his family. If he only worries about himself and his family, he is a bad man. If he associates with men who cares nothing about others, then we have to ask, what kind of person is he?