Expat, I really did try to mitigate the contentious impact of this study and I'm sorry it did not prevent you from reacting this way. Very little in this response rises above ad hominem abusive.

Re: your suspicions of the data.
I think you need to produce positive counter-evidence to be effective.

Re: George Soros.
You did read the first sentence of the the second paragraph I wrote, or didn't you?

I have enough familiarity with 19^th century American history to know that the period to which you refer is after the war between the states and that Tocqueville was writing about America in the first half of the century.

The market was freer in the last half of the 19^th than it is now, but many of the origins of our economic problems had already begun to flower. I recommend reading Murray Rothbard's Origins of the Welfare State in America.

As far as listing the ways in which the church and philanthropic organizations help the poor, I don't at all understand what you're going on about. It is so obvious what churches and philanthropic organizations do that I must be failing to catch your meaning.

Let's just assume that there's something wrong with an entrepreneurial employer stipulating the terms of employment at his place of business and that other entrepreneurs in the area wouldn't happily offer a higher wage in order to drain the labor from their big box competitor and run him out of business.

Likewise, let's just forget that despite offering lower wages, the big box entrepreneur is also offering lower prices for a lower income community.

Let's just assume the market simply fails, for mysterious reasons, to move toward a balance of relative prices in labor, goods, land, and capital.

These are all grandiose assumptions, but let's allow them for the sake of your hypothetical situation.

The Church, then, should admonish its congregations. If the big box entrepreneur is a member of the church, the elders should proceed with discipline. If the big box customers are in the congregation, they should be admonished to boycott. The deacons should take a special collection for the impoverished families of the people who work for the big box retailer.

It's worth noting that the New England Puritans did take like-minded approaches to what I describe above. While I disagree with many Puritan policies, especially as they regard economics and political philosophy, they did stipulate a profit margin and there were cases of excommunication of businessmen who charged margins above their fixed percentage.

So the question remains and is still present, what happens when the free market indeed does not step up to the plate?

What happens is that a convenient excuse is created for Statists to intervene in the market. However, this excuse is often predicated on a false utopianism that demands perfection (or some arbitrary standard of success) from the free market.

The problem is that the government can do no better and often creates worse economic deprivations. And, it exacerbates the inefficacy of the Church by taking away more income from its members and creating an it's-someone-else's-problem mentality.