If instead, like Pistor, we attribute the production and distribution of wealth to a combination of legalized theft and an elaborately veiled ponzi scheme that moves money around without creating anything of real value, we are certainly speaking the language of the left, but it is a language with a distinctly populist tinge. A true Marxist would at this point interject that only a politics that grasps exploitation at its root, not in the sphere of distribution but in the sphere of production itself, can really offer any escape from prevailing conditions of inequality. But Pistor holds Marxism at a distance both analytically and politically. Understandably enough, she dismisses any prospect of a Marxist revolution against capitalism. Leftist populism, on the other hand, is enjoying a substantial vogue both in Europe and the Americas. And perhaps the best way to read Pistor is as offering a highly sophisticated program for a leftist economic populism.

ISTM your repetition of constitutional platitudes doesn't really address these points. Sure, we shouldn't take properties from the people who own them. Except... that happens all the time in this "best of all possible worlds". The way to retain one's property isn't to trust the Constitution. The way to retain one's property, and that of others as well, is to hire the right lawyers. Which may be the point of this book?