Former chief counsel to the U.S. Senate Finance Committee, Jeff Gates and others have produced long lists of those endorsing the principle of employee-owned firms ranging from Ronald Reagan and George Will on the right, to Robert Kuttner and Robert Reich on the left.

I am not accusing the wealthy of doing anything nefarious or intentionally harmful. There is no reason to suppose that top corporate executives, the successes of Wall Street, and other “high-worth” individuals have conspired to hijack the American economy for themselves. Each has merely behaved rationally in pursuit of his or her private interests.

A close examination of why the pay of top executives of large corporations has soared in recent decades and why the compensation of managers and traders on Wall Street has skyrocketed even further has less to do with any supposed surge in the value of their insights or skills than with their increasing power to set market rules that enrich themselves.

They [the negative consequences resulting from people who feel that the system is unfair and arbitrary and that hard work does not pay off] turn an economy and a society into what mathematicians would call a “negative-sum” game. When capitalism ceases to deliver economic gains to the majority, it eventually stops delivering them at all — even to a wealthy minority at the top. It is unfortunate that few of those at the top have yet to come to understand this fundamental truth.

If history is any guide, reform is likely to begin in America and inspire reform elsewhere. That’s because Americans have always tended to choose pragmatism over ideology. When we have recognized a problem and understood the reason for it, our habit has been to get on with the messy job of solving it. Whenever capitalism has before reached points of crisis, we have not opted for communism or fascism or any other grand scheme. Again and again we have saved capitalism from its own excesses by making necessary corrections.

The essential challenge is political rather than economic. It is impossible to reform an economic system whose basic rules are under the control of an economic elite without altering the allocation of political power that lies behind the control.

Their [Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page of Northwestern University] conclusion: “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.” Instead, lawmakers respond to the policy demands of wealthy individuals and moneyed business interests — those with the most lobbying prowess and deepest pockets to bankroll campaigns.

As sociologist Robert Putnam has documented, Americans stopped being a nation of “joiners.” By the 1980s, the vast mosaic of organizations that had given force and meaning to American pluralism was coming apart. By the first decades of the twenty-first century, many of these organizations had all but disappeared, as had their collective voices.

Unions have continued to lobby and make campaign contributions, but their political and economic clout has waned, especially when compared with that of big corporations, trade associations, Wall Street, and wealthy individuals. In the 2012 elections, for example, the Koch brothers’ political network alone spent more than $400 million. This sum was more than twice the political spending of the ten largest labor unions put together.

Perhaps it was not entirely coincidental that the Obama administration never put tough conditions on banks receiving bailout money, never prosecuted a single top Wall Street executive for the excesses that led to the near meltdown, and even refused to support a small tax on financial transactions that would have generated tens of billions of dollars in annual revenues and discouraged program trading.

The reason Democrats have pulled their punches with the financial sector for years is because it’s hard to punch the hand that feeds you.

In 2012, the two biggest donors were Sheldon and Miriam Adelson, who contributed $56.8 million and $46.6 million, respectively. But the Adelsons were only the tip of a vast iceberg of contributors from the uberwealthy. Of the Forbes list of four hundred richest Americans that year, fully 388 made political contributions.

The moral crisis of our day has nothing to do with gay marriage or abortion. It is insider trading, obscene CEO pay, wage theft from ordinary workers, Wall Street’s gambling addiction, corporate payoffs to friendly politicians, and the billionaire takeover of our democracy.

In the run-up to the 2016 elections, billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch joined forces with their wealthy friends to assemble a war chest of nearly $1 billion — allowing their political organization to operate on the same scale as the Republican and Democratic parties.

Writing for a majority of the court, Justice Anthony Kennedy simply declared that “independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.” Small wonder that confidence in political institutions and actors continues to wane. In 1964, just 29 percent of voters believed that government was “run by a few big interests looking out for themselves.” But by 2013 that opinion predominated, with 79 percent of Americans agreeing.

Countervailing power has all but disappeared in America. Not surprisingly, most Americans feel powerless, disdain politics and politicians, and express cynicism about the possibilities for meaningful change. But powerlessness is also a self-fulfilling prophecy. The only way back towards a democracy and economy that work for the majority is for the majority to become politically active once again, establishing a new countervailing power.