You sound as if you're dismissing "anti-conservative/capitalist" as an illegitimate position. I've never known a conservative to react any other way to an attempt to have a serious discussion about things like economics. I'm guilty of writing off conservatives as irrational people who aren't willing to have a serious conservation, instead sticking their fingers in their ears and loudly grunting "USA! USA!..." over and over.

Political economics is only coming more to the forefront as time goes on. Just today, Hillary announced she's going to run for President as some sort of champion of the people, focusing on the hot issue of financial inequality. Great, the She-Wolf of Wall Street will save us from capitalism...

Remember that week in January when Mitt was toying with running again, and Mitt 3.0 was also going to solve the problem of inequality? A lot of other Republicans initially jumped on that bandwagon, but everybody dropped it within a week, and nothing's been heard from Republicans about it until recently. The latest Republican "thinking" on the issue is, of course, to double down on the very policies that created the problem in the first place, by again reducing taxes on the "job creators" and "reducing burdensome regulation" of course and ad nauseum.

This is what I mean by "anti-conservative/anti-capitalist" being a legitimate point of view: There's now scientific evidence that conservative economic policies enrich the already rich, destroy the middle class, and vindictively torment the poor. Republicans ran from the issue because they realize how bad they're going to look when people dig into the problem.

Talk to me after you've read Thomas Piketty's "Capital in the 21st Century". Then we can discuss the U-shaped graph of inequality over time, and how its major inflection points exactly track changes in government economic policy. We can discuss how the graph of inequality is also a graph of the influence of conservative economic policies.

Key takeaway: It all started going bad for the middle class around 1980. Remember what happened in 1980?

So sure, let's discuss. But let's discuss it for real. Is the truth that a rising tide lifts all boats? Or has the old folk saying that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer been the real wisdom all along? Is capitalism a panacea, or the problem?

We don't need to resort to faith, we have hard facts. If you won't run from them, I'll talk about them.

One other thing: I'd love to pick up the discuss about the move "Elysium". I finally watched it, coincidentally while reading "Capital in the 21st Century", and the movie struck me almost like a sober documentary about where we're headed. Since when have the rich not isolated themselves as far from the rabble--from us--as possible? If the new aristocrats can build themselves castles in space, they damn well will. ("Astrocrats"?) Just ask Richard Branson. Or Elon Musk.