In reality, the "opinions" of the masses are seldom well thought out and a poor basis for policy. For example, global warming denial , anti-evolution, anti-vaccination, silicon breast implants, wars of choice, anti-fracking, anti-GMO, on and on show that the mass opinion and strongly held beliefs can be just plan wrong.



We might note that the top 10% of our society ( money, education and intelligence) probably has more reasoned "opinions" on a variety of policy issues than the masses. If you assume that the political class, which is mainly in the top 10% in terms of education and wealth (if we include the present worth of their rich pensions and perks) actually wants to do what is best for the masses (rather than their self-interest as described in public choice theory), we will still end up with policies that are more reasonable and thought out than what you get from the average person questioned on the street. So policy would agree with the top 10% more often.



So doing a correlation type analysis on policy using "public opinion" data with implications of causation is why social science is considered a joke by the hard sciences. The conclusions are just opinions and beliefs in support of the authors confirmation biases, not the truth.



You can equally postulate that the political class is purely self interested and the real "KINGS" in our society and the "rich" are just the Barons who are required to pay tribute to the Kings and their scions. Can Bill Gates demand (by force of law -- aka the gun) that a Senator come to his board room and be publically humiliated on live TV, or is it the other way around? Are the rich just pawns of the political class, which then can use the rich for obtaining tribute via extortion, with the threat of a federal investigation, etc. Like the Barons of old where the King does grant "franchises" to the Barons, which lets the Barons take the heat from the masses exploited by those "franchises", our political class does grant favors to it cronies who then feed their scions on K street.



The stated worry about the rich is the formation of dynasties, but you seldom see the scions of the rich running the companies that have founded. Wall street understands the genetics of regression toward the mean where the probability of the scion being a poor performer relative to the founder is elevated. Wang computer -- remember them -- tied a scion and failed. In the political class, we ended up with the scion "C" student, party animal, shallow thinking, drug taking, "decider" as POTUS named Bush, whose deciding got us into loosing wars in Iraq that we are still not done with. He was running against another scion Gore. Where is the dynasty problem?



Note, for what we spent on Iraq, we could have installed enough alternative energy to replace our our oil imports and the maximum energy output of Iraq. The oil of the Middle East would go the way of whale oil (pre-crude oil critical resource),



