Numerous people have long observed that extreme wealth inequality is fundamentally incompatible with democracy. While every voice matters in a democracy, those who have great wealth have a much louder voice; which they use to accumulate even more wealth. And the circle spins ever faster.
As Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis so eloquently stated: “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”
I have assembled statements made over the last 2 millennia by nearly three dozen people regarding the impact of extreme wealth on governance and democracy.
Statements regarding the pernicious influence of great wealth on democracy
| Person | Statement |
| Plato Philosopher ~380 BCE | “Any city, however small, is in fact divided into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich; these are at war with one another.” |
| Aristotle Philosopher ~350 BCE | “Great then is the good fortune of a state in which the citizens have a moderate and sufficient property; for where some possess much, and the others nothing, there may arise an extreme democracy, or a pure oligarchy; or a tyranny may grow out of either extreme… And democracies are safer and more permanent than oligarchies, because they have a middle class which is more numerous and has a greater share in the government; for when there is no middle class, and the poor greatly exceed in number, troubles arise, and the state soon comes to an end |
| Benjamin Franklin Polymath 1776 | “An enormous proportion of property vested in a few individuals is dangerous to the rights, and destructive of the common happiness of mankind…” |
| Adam Smith Economist 1776 | “For one very rich man, there must be at least five hundred poor, and the affluence of the few supposes the indigence of the many. The affluence of the rich excites the indignation of the poor, who are often both driven by want, and prompted by envy, to invade his possessions..” |
| James Madison 4th US President 1787 | The man who is possessed of wealth, who lolls on his sofa, or rolls in his carriage, cannot judge of the wants or feelings of the day laborer. |
| Thomas Jefferson 3rd US President 1816 | “I hope we shall … crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and to bid defiance to the laws of their country.” |
| Alexis de Tocqueville Sociologist 1835 | “…it is easy to perceive that the wealthy members of the community entertain a hearty distaste to the democratic institutions of their country.” |
| John Stuart Mill Philosopher 1848 | “With respect to the large fortunes acquired by gift or inheritance, the power of bequeathing is one of those privileges of property which are fit subjects for regulation on grounds of general expediency; and I have already suggested, as a possible mode of restraining the accumulation of large fortunes in the hands of those who have not earned them by exertion, a limitation of the amount which any one person should be permitted to acquire by gift, bequest, or inheritance.” |
| Theodore Roosevelt 26th US President 1910 | “… ruin in its worst form is inevitable if our national life brings us nothing better than swollen fortunes for the few…” |
| Woodrow Wilson 28th US President 1913 | “If monopoly persists, monopoly will always sit at the helm of the government. I do not expect to see monopoly restrain itself. If there are men in this country big enough to own the government of the United States, they are going to own it; what we have to determine now is whether we are big enough, whether we are men enough, whether we are free enough, to take possession again of the government which is our own.” |
| Walter Lippmann Journalist 1914 | “The invisible government tends to be concentrated in the hands of the few because of the expense of manipulating the social machinery which controls the opinions and habits of the masses. To advertise on a scale which will reach fifty million persons is expensive. To reach and persuade the group leaders who dictate the public’s thoughts and actions is likewise expensive.” |
| John Dewey Philosopher 1935 | “Power today resides in control of the means of production, exchange, publicity, transportation and communication. Whoever owns them rules the life of the country…” |
| Franklin D. Roosevelt 32nd US President 1938 | “…the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism—ownership of Government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.” |
| Louis Brandeis SCOTUS Justice 1941 | “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” |
| Albert Einstein 1949 | “Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands… The result of these developments is an oligarchy of private capital the enormous power of which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. … The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. … private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights.” |
| Barry Goldwater US Senator 1960 | “the role of money is way out of line. It’s strangling us. The influence of money distorts everything. Government of and by the people, for example, is waning… representative government assumes that elections will be controlled by the citizenry at large, not by an elitist group of big givers” |
| Dwight Eisenhower 34th US President 1961 | “.…we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” |
| William O. Douglas SCOTUS Justice 1975 | “Industrial power should be decentralized. It should be scattered into many hands, so that the fortunes of the people will not be dependent on … a few self-appointed men. ” |
| Noam Chomsky Philosopher 1995 | “Concentration of wealth yields concentration of political power. And concentration of political power gives rise to legislation that increases and accelerates the cycle.” |
| Warren Buffett Billionaire 2006 | “There’s class warfare, all right,but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” And “Equality of opportunity has been on the decline. A progressive and meaningful estate tax is needed to curb the movement of a democracy toward plutocracy.” |
| Sonia Sotomayor SCOTUS Justice 2010 | the American people “have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self-government since the founding, and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt” |
| Joseph Stiglitz Nobel laureate Economist 2011 | “The political system is more akin to ‘one dollar one vote’ than to ‘one person one vote.’” |
| Barack Obama 44th US President 2013 | “…rising inequality and declining mobility are bad for our democracy. Ordinary folks can’t write massive campaign checks or hire high-priced lobbyists and lawyers to secure policies that tilt the playing field in their favor at everyone else’s expense. And so people get the bad taste that the system is rigged, and that increases cynicism and polarization, and it decreases the political participation that is a requisite part of our system of self-government.” |
| Thomas Piketty Economist 2013 | Extreme fiscal inequality is “…incompatible with the meritocratic values and principles of social justice fundamental to modern democratic societies” |
| Martin Gilens & Benjamin Page Political Scientists 2014 | “Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence” |
| Jimmy Carter 39th US President 2015 | “Now [the United States] is just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president” |
| Paul Volker Chair, Federal Reserve 2018 | “We are developing into a plutocracy.” |
| Nancy Pelosi Speaker of House of Representatives 2018 | “The concentration of wealth is a problem because it distorts our democracy, destabilizes the economy and erodes our at our social and cultural fabric. Too much concentrated wealth leads to too much concentrated power and begins to undermine our participatory democracy” |
| Elizabeth Warren US Senator 2019 | “…if you don’t have money and you don’t have connections, Washington doesn’t want to hear from you. When government works only for the wealthy and well-connected, that is corruption – plain and simple…Corruption is a cancer on our democracy.” |
| Robert Reich Economist 2019 | “Today, the great divide in American politics isn’t between right and left. …the biggest divide in America today runs between oligarchy and democracy. When oligarchs fill the coffers of political candidates, they neuter democracy” |
| Anand Giridharadas Author 2020 | “Tech is where the new money, the new power is” “This vision is fundamentally incompatible with democracy.” |
| Bernie Sanders US Senator 2024 | “We are moving rapidly into an oligarchic form of society. Never before in American history have so few billionaires, so few people, have so much wealth and so much power.” |
| Mitt Romney US Senator 2026 | “I’m concerned about the amount of money a few people are getting. I mean the idea that Elon Musk is going to be a trillionaire, what does that mean? We are talking about a thousand billions. And that means, you know, he could drop a couple of billion in a political campaign to support someone who would give him even more power and he’s not just the only one. I shouldn’t just pick on him, but there are others that are going to become hundreds of billions of dollars in wealth, and they will influence our political system.” |
Lest anyone believe I disfavor capitalism, I want to tell you otherwise. I adamantly believe that capitalism is the best way to structure a society’s economy, and history has mostly borne this out. However I also believed unbridle capitalism, which allows goods to be priced in a way that ignore their true longterm cost to society is immoral; I believe we need a rational form of capitalism.
Also see: Tax Billionaires’ Wealth – Free the 95%
Hayward Zwerling
28 February 2025
