> Now, among the wealthy and powerful you also get types like the Koch brothers, who use their power for dubious ends - that's inevitable in a capitalist system.

It's not. Don't accept the status quo as inevitable. Money wasn't always so enormously concentrated in a few hands, and the disparity wasn't always so great. It's worse now in the U.S. than in modern history, and worse than on other Western nations. It's now in an extreme state.

The current rules of the economy, the tax rates, etc. that yield this situation are not inevitable or somehow natural. They aren't the result of capitalism or the free market. They are simply the product of politics that favor one group (a group that now has enormous power over government) over others.

> There's no way to prevent that aside from very strict socialism

I disagree. They can have their money, and we can separate money from politics. If we take money out of elections then money loses a great amount of influence. If we decide and fund public issues democratically, as our nation fundementally believes, everyone gets a vote in deciding things for their community. For example, I was reading that because government is so under-funded a park in a New York was being funded by someone wealthy. Now who decides where that park should go and what it should look like? Instead of being decided democratically by everyone in the community, it's dictated by the oligarch. That's not democracy.

> Democracy is not some magic solution. It's often described as the best of a lot of bad options.

I agree, but it's clearly the most effective; almost all the nations that lead in their citizen's welfare, from health to education to safety to civil rights to economic issues, are democracies. Also, there is very importat moral component - nobody has a right to tell me what to do, and if we have to come to an agreemet, we should vote on it with everyone getting an equal say.

> if you look at democracies in the third-world and developing world where your average person is uneducated - doesn't lead to good results.

I disagree that the results are necessarily worse than they would be under other forms of government. Also, we're talking about the United States and not a developing country.

> The best form of government has often been described as a benevolent dictatorship.

Hmmm ... I haven't heard that from anyone but the dictators who want people to think they are benevolent. If they are so effective and benevolent, why not hold an election? No doubt everyone will vote for them.

> I see no problem with people like Bill Gates having amassed power, money, and influence, because he can use it far more effectively than a mob of your average citizens would - the average citizen being a lot less educated and less intelligent than Bill Gates.

Let's assume Gates is more intelligent than the average (almost certainly true) and is purely benevolent (certainly not true, and remember the corrupting influence of power). He still can't do better because he can't possibly understand the interests and needs of millions of people; nobody has that capacity. That, along with the lack of true benevolence, is one place where central planning fails and where free markets and democracy succeed. The people who don't have a seat at the table are the ones who get their interests trampled on because either nobody cares, or people think of course, the other person's priorities really aren't as important as their own.