This Presidential campaign has been one for the history books, and not in a good way.  Bernie Sanders's and Hillary Clinton's campaigns are based on their rage against the "undeserving rich," the 1%, the Donald Trumps of the world.  This gets so tiresome and sounds so hollow, especially given the Clintons' prodigious wealth, most of it ill-gained.  Have either of these candidates or their supporters ever been to a museum?  A hospital?  A theater?  A university?  Have they hoped to send their kids to a prestigious film school, music school, or medical school?  Most likely they have been to at least one or two of such institutions and taken the perks of the others for granted.  Did they notice the names on the walls and buildings, the names of all the people who made those museums, hospitals, universities and theaters possible?  Perhaps not.  A name we've never seen at any of these places is Clinton.  And Trump's name appears only on buildings he owns or those to which he has sold his name.

The Music Center in Los Angeles is a wonder to behold.  One can see opera, drama, classical music, all of the finest quality.  None of it would be possible without the generosity of the very wealthy people who gave, and continue to give, millions of their dollars to make these places an ongoing reality for the public: Disney Hall, a Frank Gehry masterpiece, is a gift to the city from the Disney family. 

Have they ever known someone hospitalized at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles?  It is a state-of-the-art hospital, one of the best in the world.  Their doctors and nurses save countless lives every day.  You cannot walk through any of their many buildings without seeing the names of the donors who made the place possible on the walls and buildings in which miracles are performed on a daily basis.  Most of these names are unknown to the people who work there and are treated there, but they all benefit from the state-of-the-art science and technology made possible by the generosity of the very rich.

Larry Ellison just gave USC $200 million for cancer research.  And yet Bernie Sanders loathes people like Larry Ellison.  He hates the people who have earned so much money they can afford to donate millions to the causes of their choice.  He believes the government should take the money away from people like Ellison, take it away or prevent them from earning it in the first place.  That is the brand of socialism Bernie Sanders embraces.  Enforced equality -- the cost to our once civilized society be damned.  One only has to look at the quality of such institutions, if they even exist, in socialist or communist countries, to grasp the chasm between what we in America take for granted and what the citizens of socialist nations do not enjoy thanks to forced equality.

Visit the Los Angeles County Museum of Art or MOCA, the Getty, the Norton-Simon Museum of Art in Pasadena, which has one of the finest art collections in the world. Notice, as you browse through the numerous buildings chock full of some of the world's finest works of art, the names in large print on the walls or in fine print somewhere else.  If it were not for the largesse of the very wealthy, those buildings, those galleries, that art would not be available to the public.   The Autry Museum in Los Angeles, which honors the art and history of the American West, is a fabulous place.  It exists solely because people like Gene Autry, and the other generous people who could afford to make it happen, gave the money to see it through. 

The same is true throughout America, in every state and most cities.  Consider the museums of New York, Washington D.C., Chicago, the WWII museum in New Orleans, and many others.  Access to the arts and tangible history are available to us all thanks to the people wealthy and generous enough to build and fund universities, theaters, and museums.  Millions of people are treated and made well, no matter how difficult their medical problems, at hospitals built with money donated by the fortunate rich.  And yet Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, she rich but not at all generous, attack these people every day.  Their rallies, their speeches, are rife with anti-capitalist rhetoric.  None of those places would exist if it were not for capitalism.  Not one of them.  Our kids would not be visiting these museums on field trips, seeing plays in our theaters, or be treated in the emergency rooms of the finest hospitals in the world if it were not for the capitalist system that has improved the lives and health of multi-millions of people and the Judeo-Christian values that has led the most fortunate among us to share their wealth.   

As a nation, we have arrived at the crossroads.   Do we want an angry, incompetent and greedy person like Hillary, a known liar, socialist like Sanders, who means to punish success and promote undeserved entitlement at the expense of others, or Trump, who grasps the nature of work, business and success and at least believes he can rehabilitate the country, so debilitated by seven and a half years of the Obama administration?