[Billthedrill]

Capitalism is protected from democracy...

This is such utter drivel that I'm thinking Kinsley will be embarrassed by it if he's embarrassed by anything - democracy is a political system based on people voting directly on issues rather than channeling that vote through a representative; capitalism is an economic system wherein surplus funds are redirected by their owners to funding other enterprises. They do not conflict. One does not need to be "protected" from the other.

What Kinsley evidently means is that a society with egalitarian ideals must permit inequality if it is to run a capitalist economic system. And so it must. But a society with egalitarian ideals is not the same thing as a society intending to enforce equal possession of wealth by state fiat. It is the latter to which the redistributionist nostrums so beloved to the left pertain. It is perfectly true that you cannot attain equal distribution of wealth across a society under capitalism; it is equally true that you can't obtain it under a state mandated socialism either. You can aspire, you can idealize, you can theorize, but you just can't make it happen, and every attempt to do so on a national level without a single exception has, in practice, increased unequal distribution of wealth rather than decreased it. In short, Kinsley's social theory is crap and he'll never admit it.

[Alberta's Child]

To summarize . . . Give the public unfettered access to the treasury, and the nation will eventually be broke.

[Catalonia]

You nailed it completely. When the socialist-minded start trying to equate democracy with equality, you know they are getting ready to employ a philosophical Trojan horse with which to spout socialist drivel.

In other words, they must change the definition of democracy and/or capitalism in order to build their house of cards.

[jjm2111]

Well put.

[Steve_Seattle]

"It is perfectly true that you cannot attain equal distribution of wealth across a society under capitalism; it is equally true that you can't obtain it under a state mandated socialism either. You can aspire, you can idealize, you can theorize, but you just can't make it happen, and every attempt to do so on a national level without a single exception has, in practice, increased unequal distribution of wealth rather than decreased it."

I'm not even sure that "equality" is a goal of communist theoreticians. In practice, communism always seems to lead to an oligarchy in which a corrupt, self-serving leadership keeps the best of everything for themselves and imposes a drab equality on everyone else. I think this is why it is so easy for many of the affluent elite to imagine themselves as socialists - they sense that in a socialist or communist regime they themselves would remain part of the ruling oligarchy and would thus retain their perks and privileges.