Capitalism in Faulkner and today

Could there be any greater short vignette about the evils of cold-hearted capitalism than the "trial" scene in Faulkner's The Hamlet, when the woman stands before the county judge and pleads for the return of the $5 her husband paid for a wild horse - as she notes plaintively, the auctioneer gave the $5 back to his boss, the evil Flem Snopes, and when she went to Snopes to claim the money he said he didn't have it, the Texan took it with him; then Snopes, sitting on the verandah of his store, surrounded by a bunch of village louts, whittling, asks her to wait a minute - goes into the store - and comes out w/ a small bag of candy that he "gives" her - and then ostentatiously pays the clerk, his employee, a nickle. Horrible. In the trial, the woman does not recount this but merely pleads for the money in her meek way - she says if she'd know the money if it were returned to her because she earned it over time from her knitting and saved it for shoes for "the chaps" - she has that weak an understanding of the fungibility of cash. The judge can't find for her, though, as it's not clear to the law who owns the (escaped) horse. So she walks away from the courtroom - she tried, pathetically. This section of the novel is called The Peasants (I think all or part of this section may also sometimes appear as a novella under the title Spotted Horses?) and you can see that she - and others - really are peasants who had a bit of a place, albeit at the bottom, in the feudal structure of the Old South where at least to a degree the community cared for their interests, but in the New South, with its cash economy and legal contracts, the peasants are lost and without recourse: they are the detritus that capitalism would throw aside, as would many people, many political movements, perhaps even one national political party, would do today.