[twoodfin]

It occurs to me that if you charted a distribution of political power (pick your metric for that…) it’d look about the same.

A few thousand state and federal officials, rich businessmen with influence, lobbyists, union leaders, …

At the far right you’d have governors of large states, Supreme Court justices, Congressional committee chairs, the President.

Nobody seems to get too worked up over this, it’s the system we’ve chosen. But as a group the folks on the far right of that distribution exercise and have exercised way more critical leverage over the state of my life—during Covid, say—than Larry Ellison and the Walmart heirs.

[debit-freak]

I’d argue that more so than anyone alive having “chosen” this structure, it’s what the structure itself wants to perpetuate. Eg people who go to elite colleges tend to see elite colleges as a reflection of “the system working” or whatever and view other concerns other than perpetuating this as secondary concerns. Same with government jobs, industry, etc etc.

[Retric]

Singling out COVID is misleading because of the short timeframe. Overall I’ve been more impacted by Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates choices than any single president in my lifetime.

A President has limited power for 4 or 8 years, and that’s it. We don’t put 22 year olds on the Supreme Court or let them act unilaterally. Sure laws stick around but that’s the result of what hundreds of people and other groups of people not changing the rules in a few years.

[EasyMark]

“…than any single president in my lifetime.”

So far! (I would add)

i think the next presidency may be very very different and I give that about 50/50 odds

[csomar]

Covid, at least the first few months, is an irregularity. Most of the world was freaked out at that time regardless of the country and its hierarchical society. On the other hand, these business interests lobbied to either open/close to benefit their own bottom lines.

[hollerith]

If it were somehow possible to arrange things so that political power was equally distributed (e.g., with nationwide direct democracy deciding all important policy decisions), then life in our country would probably get much much worse.

[twoodfin]

Yup, same as economic power/wealth.

[debit-freak]

How do you figure?

[mrtesthah]

Nice, so when do we get to elect the billionaires?

[twoodfin]

You don’t elect a lot of the people with power, either.

My point is we worry a lot about outliers in a wealth distribution but not the outliers in a power distribution (some people, of course, being outliers in both!)

And that seems misguided to me for the reason I mentioned: The unfortunate exercise of political power at least anecdotally seems to be more of a risk to the average person’s health and happiness than the misuse of dollars.

[jacobolus]

Assuming you are talking about the USA:

> don’t elect a lot of the people with power, either

A republic only works if the people with public political power are accountable to the public. Any employee or officer of the US government at any level is accountable in this way: most are accountable to the institutions they work for, which are themselves accountable to Congress and the President (or state/local elected officers), with elections as the ultimate accountability to the people. The courts are also supposed to be accountable to the public, but in recent years a profoundly corrupt and self-serving Supreme Court has expanded its own power, run roughshod over norms of civility and propriety, and all but erased its own accountability. This imbalance will be addressed sooner or later by Congress and the President, who will rein in the corrupt Court and hopefully make structural fixes preventing future corruption, but it is jarringly anti-republican in the short term.

There are of course many people with power who are not directly part of the government. Such people are only accountable to the people to the extent the people's representatives make and enforce laws affecting their behavior. As an example, it would make a big improvement to many parts of the economy if anti-trust laws were enforced in their original spirit to prevent large firms from using monopoly power in anti-competitive ways, etc.

> we worry a lot about outliers in a wealth distribution but not the outliers in a power distribution

This is certainly not true of a general "we" meaning residents or citizens. To the contrary, there is consistently significant worry about unbalanced political power, which is a running theme of US politics.

[atmavatar]

I support term limits for billionaires as well.