PolicyMic posted an article with the following headline: “Pope Francis Denounces Capitalism, But Is He Right?” Short answer: absolutely (dude is infallible, after all)–especially since renowned hedge fund manager Stanley Druckenmiller essentially agrees with the Pope, as we shall see below.

Of course, the writer of the article wishes to show how wrong-headed the pope is in his latest apostolic exhortation (the pope’s, not the PolicyMic guy’s). So he says this:

“As is typical with many leftist critics of capitalism, the pope is looking at the end result and losing the forest for the trees.“

What? Someone actually looking at the outcomes a given policy produces and criticizing said policy (of course, capitalism, in this case) based on one’s observations of the outcomes of that policy? That’s preposterous! Except of course, it isn’t.

PolicyMic post actually an apology for “Reverse Socialism”

That sort of criticism is fairly typical of the defenders of what I’ve long called “reverse socialism,” namely the idea that “our theory is absolutely correct even if it’s terrible in practice.” Reverse socialism is, of course, the system to which we are currently yoked and can be defined in a few words: profits are privatized while losses are socialized. The 2008 bailout springs immediately to mind as does the Cyprus “bail-in” of this year. Another way to define reverse socialism in a few words: “too big to fail.”

Redistribution: not what they’d have you believe

The PolicyMic article does make a really good point with which I totally agree:

“Redistribution is totalitarian and oppressive.”

Well, duh! Though the writer does not define “redistribution,” we know without having to ask that he means “redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor.” That kind of redistribution deeply offends the writer.

However, the redistribution is going in the complete opposite direction, from the poor and middle class to the very wealthy. And that’s not just me saying that, that’s Stanley Druckenmiller, again, a well-known hedge fund manger. He says exactly that in this video (at 10 seconds in):

If you didn’t watch the video, he said:

“This is the biggest redistribution of wealth from the middle class and the poor to the rich ever.”

What’s he talking about? The Fed’s decision to NOT stop QE unlimited, which is the Fed’s injection of $85 billion a month into the banking system.

When the pope agrees with a hedge fund manager whose last company had $12 billion in assets as of 2010, maybe we are in fact getting to the heart of the matter, i.e., that putting the lipstick of “capitalism” on the pig of reverse socialism is not getting us anywhere near to anything like the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” that are among our “unalienable rights” that our government is supposed to be insuring for all of us.