Yeah, this is the part of the essay where I really did a double-take. He actually writes: "Can you have a healthy society with great variation in wealth? What w

Yeah, this is the part of the essay where I really did a double-take. He actually writes: "Can you have a healthy society with great variation in wealth? What would it look like? Notice how novel it feels to think about that." That is not novel at all. The connection between economic power and political power is a very old subject. Complaints about the influence of money in politics and hence about the influence of inequality in politics are probably only slightly younger than politics itself. I have been saying for years that one of the most important reasons for being critical of (excessive) economic inequality is that it destabilizes democracy, since the market is fundamentally one-dollar-one-vote rather than one-person-one-vote.