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What you're missing is that wealth - particularly extreme wealth - isn't just about quality of living, it's about power. That's (a major reason) why relative we

What you're missing is that wealth - particularly extreme wealth - isn't just about quality of living, it's about power. That's (a major reason) why relative wealth matters in a society: the extremely wealthy can reshape not just their personal lives, but the entire society around them, to suit their preferences. The extremely wealthy don't have to care if a new public policy is bad for the commons (any given commons; the natural environment, public education, civil freedoms, etc), because they can always just buy their way out of the consequences. Nearly the entire society underneath them can be left to rot, and as long as there's enough of a husk left that their wealth still matters, they don't have to care. They can even make it decay on purpose if it serves to deepen their moat of power.

closeparen 5y ago
At the level of "extreme wealth" where you own a newspaper or bankroll a think tank, you're not working for wages, and you're not realizing a dollar more in taxable income than necessary. These people really aren't part of income inequality, or reached by income tax. I assume you're not talking about them. The professional-managerial class do wield considerably more power than the working class. I don't think that's because they have money, though. I think it's because the state is a large organization. People with the skills to run a state will rarely want for white-collar employment. People who influence bureaucracies for a living will also be pretty good at getting what they want from the state. Imagine. Who's going to win a national electoral campaign, who couldn't land a job in marketing?