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.
> 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.
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.