Free markets are good, essential even, to the workings of a truly free society. However, when one applies ‘market’ principles to society itself, then everything becomes for sale. Including the law. And when the law and law making are determined through financial clout, you get this. Crony capitalism, a rigged game, a plutocratic banana republic. America is becoming the biggest banana republic on earth, and we seem politically unable to stop it, because we have way too many people under the spell of a political philosophy that defines any civic constraints over a financial transaction, including one for the purchase of one’s politics, as akin to “communism” or some such. Thus, we reap the society of absurd injustice that we inhabit today.

For more on this, watch this interview from Bill Moyers talk with Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, authors of Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class, as they argue that America’s vast inequality is no accident, but in fact has been politically engineered.