[Urbane Guerrilla]

Slight but I believe related thread hijack, branching off a point DanaC raised: capitalism does something about poverty. The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success, by Rodney Stark, traces the somewhat surprising interrelationship between the medieval Catholic church and early capitalism, among other factors that worked in combination to make Western society materially and financially successful beyond all other societies, and offers some opinions why. It's more a history than a work of advocacy, though there's a bit of that too here and there.

The Catholic church nowadays has an anticapitalistic, antibusiness reputation, but this was not always so; it grew, says Stark, out of disenchantment with the abuses of the Industrial Revolution. In earlier times, the sheer scale of the business of managing the monastic estates and their assets, plus the Church's not trying to suppress the late-medieval Italians who were inventing banking and high finance, pretty much required that capitalism be devised.