It’s sad to have to point this but, as it turns out, people who favor free markets have thought about the poor for many hundreds of years, so saying “the poor” doesn’t actually amount to a refutation of the libertarian view. It’s not like libertarians hear points like this and think, omg, I can’t believe that I could have completely forgotten about poor people! Capitalism and freedom and the like can NEVER work because they completely screw the poor. Thank goodness for this great thinker for pointing out this otherwise forgotten point!
To be fair, this journalist might be completely mis-rendering the paper in question, so it might be a good idea to see what it actually says, but somehow I doubt it is actually much more sophisticated than this article suggests. And it really is demoralizing that a prince of the Church would drag down the debate to this level.
I know that I’m supposed to write a long article explaining how markets have lifted up the poor for, oh, 100,000 years. But somehow it is just exhausting to do this, when, actually, and I hate to say this, the REAL point of a paper like this and arguments like this is to please prevailing elite opinion at the NYT and elsewhere. This is why careerists like this say things like this.