A history of the rich in the West

The most obvious threat to a democratic political system is that posed by [those who can] buy both politics and justice. [...] At some point such a regime becomes a manifest plutocracy. All the real power will be in the hands of some, and not of the greatest number. These are not the words of a manifesto of the Occupy Wall Street or of a book by Thomas Piketty, but those of the leading columnist of the Financial Times, Martin Wolf, in the painfu…