Should we worry about the influence that wealthy individuals have on politics?

See Matt Zwolinski Makes Emmanuel Saez’s Error by David Henderson.

Mr. Henderson pointed out that many of Zwolinksi's examples were of corporate influence, not individual influence. And there is plenty of influence from unions like the NEA.

Excerpt:

"There were so many things to pursue here. I’ll take two. First, I live in a highly NIMBY area and I don’t notice that particularly wealthy people dominate the discussion in favor of hampering housing construction. If anything, the wealthiest people in the debate tend to be developers who want to build.

Second, Matt is quite comfortable taking away wealthy people’s money with the estate tax, which really is a death tax. What would he feel comfortable taking away from teachers and their unions so that they would be less effective in pushing in an anti-liberty direction? Their freedom of speech? I doubt it, but I don’t know his answer.

But making those points takes us away from my main point, which is that most of the lobbying is done by corporations, not wealthy individuals. There is little doubt that Disney, to take his example, would have lobbied heavily for the extreme extension of copyright even if no Disney shareholder had been particularly wealthy.

While researching my next article for Hoover, I came across something I wrote in which I had linked to a discussion in which Larry Summers asked the same question of Emmanuel Saez. Saez had failed to make the simple distinction between high-market-value corporations and wealthy people. Go to this link and follow Larry’s reasoning from the 1:06:00 point on. It’s masterful. Larry calls on Saez to give one example of a wealthy person having much less political power because the government has reduced his wealth from a very high number to a lower, but still very high, number. When Saez answers, he gives an example of a corporation, just as Zwolinski responded to me.

There is one way in which Zwolinski probably has more understanding of the relevant economics than Saez does. At the 1:10:10 point, Saez mentions robber barons as if it’s a slam dunk, showing that he doesn’t understand that the major characters listed as robbers and barons were neither. (Other than that, it’s a great expression.) My guess is that Zwolinski understands the true facts about robber barons better than Saez does."