Dear Thomas Brandywine, my beloved Tea-Partying friend, genius software-architect of the highest order and co-worker... you're crazy.

Dear Thomas Brandywine, my beloved Tea-Partying friend, genius software-architect of the highest order and co-worker, through our many lunch-time discussions on the dysfunctional aspects of this political system in which we all find ourselves, I've listened to you with patience, and I will continue to, but I've realized, you're crazy.

Let it be noted, the irony of stubbornly preaching to someone the superiority of decentralized-decision-making instead of letting them come to that conclusion for themselves.  Apparently central planning is a bad approach to organizing a society, but one place it's not is in deciding whether central-planning should be the policy of the land. "I, Tom Brandywine, centrally assert that central-planning is destructive to the sustainability of a free and vibrant civilization and would like to dispense with the marketplace when it comes to that idea."

Also Tom please evaluate the proposition that: Capitalism is good for people with capital, or the means to get capital, but for people without capital or the means to get capital, capitalism sucks.  I will note that in America and free societies, all people have the means to get capital but some have more means than others and those are the lucky rich or the lucky smart.  Let's assume that the lucky rich are not a significant factor in this argument.  We're left with the lucky smart, meaning those who are intelligent and confident enough to realize that hard-work will eventually lead to capital (where "eventually" means longer for some than others.)  In this world, capital access is correlated with drive, ambition, intelligence, charm, but for the sake of the discussion lets coalesce all these terms into one overarching word: talent.  In the world you describe, those who are more talented will get more access to capital and those with less talent will get access to less capital.

According to you, that allocation of resources is only right.  You seem to hope that people of all talent levels will somehow come to agree with you on this point.  Talent begets capital.  Less talent begets less capital.  Why don't people accept that?  Why is it not obvious to people that that this is the most sustainable way for a society to operate, the most equitable, and finally the best?  Why don't people universally concur that this is how it should be?

Tom, your answer to that last question is, "Because of all the people who are spewing hate.  The people of this country are being fed a bunch of lies and they're unwittingly eating it up."  That's where you are wrong.  Most people in this county people do not concur with the premise that capital allocations should be based on talent because, for most people, it leaves them with less capital than they want. Simple. They're not specifically concerned with the misallocation of resources stifling the growth of the abstract economy and generating long-term prosperity.  Everyone wants access to more capital in the short-term, regardless of whether they deserve it.  Everyone.  This includes the poor and the rich.  In fact, the super-rich themselves have demonstrated this time and time again.  (Dick Fuld made upwards of 300 million during his time at Lehman.  Can you possibly argue that the market properly rewarded him based on his talent?  The company is now dead. BTW, the internet is full of articles pointing out executive compensation packages that make most non-super-rich internet users raise an eyebrow.)

So the question becomes, if someone who is rich and has the right connections can get access to quantities of capital that are not actually correlated with their talent, like Dick Fuld, how can a group of people who are not rich, and do not have access to the right connections get access to capital that is similarly not correlated with their talent?  The answer is simple and built directly into the heart of the Constitution and American democracy.  The ballot box.

The electoral system in this country is highly antagonistic to your capital-allocation ideal in that people with lower talent and lower access to capital have a disproportionate influence in the voting booth. "One man, one vote", does not a talent-based meritocracy make. Think of the government as a big gun and if they organize effectively, the people with lesser talent can take control of the government and point that big gun at the people with the greater talent, and take their capital, like an extortion racket. Of course, it's not actually an extortion-racket (or it is, albeit a very de-centralized one, which according to you Tom, has to qualify as the best kind.)

It's not an extortion racket because this analogy is an over-simplification.  I've left out that the culture of this country is very strongly oriented towards accepting talent-based allocation of resources, so it takes a high degree of perceived inequality by those without capital, for them to use that gun, which is very heavy, and unwieldy, but in their arsenal.

And unfortunately, because it's heavy, and unwieldy, once they pull out the gun, they're equally lazy about putting it back.  But make no mistake, that gun, and the bullet it shoots, a flawed government-based approach to capital allocation is the "Marxism" of which you speak and it is based on "One man, one vote", and there is nothing un-American about that.

All this being said, you have my deepest respect and admiration. :)
Nikhil