Wealth & Money Quote by Louis D. Brandeis

Brandeis doesn’t argue; he corner-pins you with an either-or. The line is built like a judicial opinion stripped to its bluntest syllogism: democracy requires broadly distributed power, and extreme wealth is power in a form that doesn’t bother to run for office. Set them together long enough and one quietly eats the other.

The intent is less moral than structural. Brandeis is warning that institutions you can name - legislatures, courts, elections - become decorative when the real leverage sits in private boardrooms. Concentrated wealth doesn’t need to abolish voting to deform it; it can buy the agenda, staff the expertise, fund the campaigns, shape the news, underwrite the think tanks, hire the lawyers who turn regulation into a maze. Democracy survives as ritual while outcomes tilt predictably toward those who can afford permanence.

The subtext is the Progressive Era’s anxiety made crystalline: the rise of trusts and monopolies wasn’t just an economic problem but a constitutional one. Brandeis, famously skeptical of “the curse of bigness,” treated antitrust and regulation as democracy-protection, not market-tidying. He’s also swatting away a comforting American myth: that fortunes are private accomplishments with no civic consequence. In his frame, inequality isn’t merely unfair; it’s incompatible with self-government because it creates a second, quieter sovereignty.

The line still lands because it refuses the compromise everyone wants to hear: that we can keep the oligarchic spoils and simply patch the system with better manners. Brandeis says the math doesn’t work.