Skeptics about democracy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries argued that the enfranchised masses would use their votes to seize the property of the relatively few rich. What could be more natural?

But it hasn’t happened, in this country or abroad, to anything like the extent that those would-be Cassandras feared. Nonetheless, we continue to hear calls for economic redistribution, the clinical term for public policies transferring money from the relatively few rich to the much more numerous non-rich.