Christmas Carol is not a treatise on Victorian economics

I just finished watching Scrooge, Albert Finney’s 1970 musical version of A Christmas Carol, and it got me thinking about the power of the story.
Powerful enough that more than 150 years later, I still see occasional columns—there was even a book some years back, though I forget the title—explaining that Dickens got his economics all wrong. That judged by their Christmas dinner, the Cratchitt family were foolish spendthrifts. That Scrooge obviously paid Cratchitt everything he deserved because in the free market people always earn what they deserve (check out here and here for examples).
Even if this were true (and one of the articles I linked to points out the economy at the time Dickens wrote meant Cratchitt faced long odds if he had to find a new job), it’s irrelevant.
As George Orwell pointed out (also at one of the links), Dickens wasn’t a systems guy. His point wasn’t that times were hard or that workers needed a legally guaranteed wage or Christmas off—it was that capitalism and the free market work better if the people in charge aren’t selfish scumbags. If they treat their employees and customers like human beings and not like suckers to be fleeced.
This is, of course, true. And it’s a truth that hasn’t gone away, which is why Dickens adapts to a 1930s setting (An American Christmas Carol) or to several present day Carols (Ms. Scrooge with Cecily Tyson, for instance) or George Scott’s 1980s version can present the Victorian poor as an analogy for the Reagan-era poor (there’s a lot of emphasis that the people Scrooge refuses to help are deserving poor, not the welfare queens Reagan liked to bullshit about).
And it’s something completely antithetical to the libertarian/Ayn Randian principles so many free marketeers claim are the only moral stance. To wit, that the only purpose of any company is to make money for the owners; that anything done in that cause is therefore moral; and if somebody gets screwed over or ripped off, it’s their own fault for not being informed consumers. If the free market doesn’t punish you, then obviously whatever you did must have been right.
Dickens’ story is a reminder that people who treat others horribly are horrible people, not admirable success stories. And that contrary to Wall Street, avarice is not good.
Regrettably, I doubt that message will ever go out of date.