Charles Dickens

Charles John Huffam Dickens (7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870) was an English writer and social critic. His novels are sometimes viewed as providing examples of how capitalism is destructive to the working class. Roderick Long criticizes the oft-cited example of Ebenezer Scrooge as a heartless capitalist by noting, "Scrooge has no use for private, voluntary forms of charity. His solutions to the problem of poverty are all governmental solutions: prisons, with their forced labor (the treadmill), and government welfare (the Poor Law), with its Union workhouses. His visitor's plea that these solutions are inefficient at best and maleficent at worst falls on deaf ears; Scrooge regards governmental solutions as sufficient, and dismisses private charity as a waste of time."