Lack of money absolutely does remove them. Billionaires like Murdoch and the Koch brothers have had a massive detrimental effect on US politics (and British, in the case of Murdoch). Without the capital they control, they wouldn't have anywhere near that kind of impact.

Not every billionaire uses their money for that kind of power, but some do, and it hurts democracy when they do. In fact, it's even been argued that legitimate philanthropy is undemocratic, because it's rich people deciding which problems society will fix, rather than a democratic process.

If money only provided luxury, people would have less problems with this inequality. And people would probably be less interested in amassing more wealth than they can consume.

Counterpoint: Michael Bloomberg recently spent almost half a billion dollars trying to convince people to make him a presidential candidate. How did that work for him?

What a lot of people don’t seem to understand is that propaganda doesn’t cause beliefs, it focuses and amplified beliefs that preexist at least in nascent form. The Koch brothers would have no power if there weren’t people ready for their kind of message. In fact this is a good example. The Koch Brothers were against the Trumpian turn in Republican politics and spent heavily against it. How did that work out for them?

Sorry money == power is too facile.

There are effective and ineffective way to use your money for power, of course. But many US politicians work for their wealthy donors. Most Senators are millionaires, no presidential candidates are poor.

The fact that some rich people only get part of what they want because they're opposed by other rich people, does not mean that their money didn't get them power. The Koch brothers got a lot of what they wanted.

And even if poor people, if there are enough of them and they are sufficiently organised, are able to oppose rich people, that still doesn't mean that the rich people don't have more power individually. Their resources make it much easier to organise, to buy influence and support, to reward politicians who legislate the way they want.

In the US, even more than in other countries, money is absolutely power.

Though he might handwave at this notion of "power imbalance", you and I both fully understand that this is not the core issue driving his philosophy. Someone making $120k a year can afford to hire a lobbyist in their state legislature. Should no one make $120k?

If there were no billionaires would the so called "power imbalance" be restored? Does someone with $900 million not have the power of someone with $1 billion? Of course not.

And money doesn't linearly equate with power. There are a number of powerful people in Washington, even unelected ones, who have no substantial fortune to their name yet wield far more power than say Jack Dorsey, Bill Ackman, or Marc Andreeson. If Piketty was truly against all concentrations of power, he would call himself a libertarian.

But Piketty is not against concentrations of power. The core idea behind Piketty's philosophy is a moral one. He believes that some people having a significant amount more than others is a moral failure in society, and must be corrected, even at an economic cost.

People in Washington (or elsewhere) who wield a lot of power without being rich, wield that power because it has been delegated to them. They are accountable for that power. Rich people are not, but probably should be.

The problem isn't merely the concentration of power, it's the concentration of unaccountable power. This is also why people are upset about secret courts and lack of congressional oversight over secret services: it withdraws accountability from an institute wielding power.

>People in Washington (or elsewhere) who wield a lot of power without being rich, wield that power because it has been delegated to them. They are accountable for that power. Rich people are not, but probably should be.

I specified the qualifier "unelected"

There are more kinds of delegated power, though.