One concrete disadvantage of _extreme_ inequality, specifically in a democracy like the US, is the erosion of your rights when they are inconvenient for those w

One concrete disadvantage of _extreme_ inequality, specifically in a democracy like the US, is the erosion of your rights when they are inconvenient for those with more wealth/soft-power than you. When wealth inequality is significant, governments decide it's better to address the needs of a much smaller set of constituents and your rights become curtailed, implicitly or not, as a result. Unless you, personally, are an oligarch, you will be negatively impacted. This may manifest as minimally as living in a society that is worse than it could be. Separately, speaking as someone that spends a lot of time with optimizers, it seems silly to not have _some_ form of regularization. That doesn't mean zero inequality (that doesn't seem good either) but we should be wary of unchecked inequality.