Word: kinsleys
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...Spreading the Wealth Around In his essay, Michael Kinsley agrees with Barack Obama that when governments spread wealth around it is "good for everybody" [Nov. 10]. Kinsley asks, "Who disagrees?" Anyone who knows anything of history would disagree with that assertion. Marx and Lenin advocated a similar idea: "From each according to his ability; to each according to his needs." The reality of a system where hard work is not rewarded is that people lose their incentive to work. That means there is less wealth to share, which is hardly "good for everybody." In the Soviet Union, it took about...
...final line of Kinsley's essay was telling. He implied that unless we spread the wealth around, we'll turn into a Colombia or Mexico, where people "live behind locked gates and hire guards to protect their family from kidnapping." Is Kinsley suggesting that to ensure their own safety the better-off should, via the government, pay protection money to the less well off? This would be playing with public money a similar game to the one rich people in banana republics play with their personal money. Mark A. Mendlovitz, Los Angeles...
...Leaders We Deserve Challenging times require leaders who are bright enough to think creatively [Oct. 27]. I completely agree with Michael Kinsley that America needs a smart President for the tough years ahead. But voters in many Western democracies, Ireland included, have a tendency to shy away from politicians who are far more intelligent than themselves. Adlai Stevenson was one of the best examples of this. As for any politician completely understanding the global financial mess, well, sadly Einstein is not on any ballot. Robert Liffey, DUBLIN...
...Kinsley is correct to say we need leaders brave enough to practice astringency, telling people what they don't want to hear. But his example of a leader who was great because he was astringent - Winston Churchill - never won an election through astringency. Throughout the 1930s, when he was warning of the Nazi peril, he was almost uniformly rejected as a crank. He was not elected Prime Minister in 1940; rather, he was installed by a Parliament that deferred general elections until after the war. And when one was finally held, in 1945, the British people promptly voted Churchill...
...Kinsley's advice to tell people "what they don't want to hear" is a recipe for disaster for any U.S. presidential candidate seeking to win votes in our rapid-fire, media-spun era of talking-points demagoguery. Adlai Stevenson, the last presidential candidate who sincerely tried to talk sense to the American people, suffered two defeats following Kinsley's advice, and the 1950s' American electorate was smarter than those immersed in today's lowest-common-denominator, Joe the Plumber world of sham politics. Our only hope is that the better candidate, Obama, can cajole people into assuring his victory...