What's all this talk about "populism" in the presidential campaign?

We're being told that the most "populist" candidates are so far winning. Evidently it's popular to bash Wall Street, capitalism, or even the nature of profit and prosperity, as such. Yet what are the alternatives? Simply this: Politicians prying more and more of this profit away from those who earn it to use for political purposes. You see, the populists don't want enterprise to end. They just want FREE enterprise to end. They don't want to destroy profit; they just want to destroy capitalism. Yet even Karl Marx himself realized that you first need a thriving capitalist economy before you can seize and loot it. (Today's politicians use a softer term: invest). Here's what "populism" misses: The more you take away from the private sector, the less economic growth and prosperity there will be. ALL tax money comes from the hated private sector. Hating and despising that upon which you depend is an irrational, even lethal contradiction. It ultimately leads to self-defeat, even for the populists themselves. Where would John Edwards, Barack Obama or Mike Huckabee be if the wealthy didn't generate all that wealth for them to seize and redistribute? If all those economic indicators that even the politicians pay attention to matter--the unemployment rate, the inflation rate, the growth rate of the economy, the real estate market--then it makes sense to leave that private economy alone rather than loot it further, doesn't it? This is the major contradiction of "populism." It's amazing how popular populism is, given how much damage it does to the very things the masses of people, and their elected officials, claim to care about. In the end, I blame the people and the voters who endorse it much more than the fools they elect to carry it out.