This truth plays out vividly in the college-bribery criminal complaint. In one passage, William Singer, the founder of a college-prep business who authorities say was the architect of the scheme, explains his plan to a prospective parent.

“Every year there is a group of families, especially where I am right now in the Bay Area, Palo Alto” who “want guarantees — they want this thing done.” He goes on to describe three different ways of getting into college, all the while playing on his mark’s class anxiety.

He explains that there is the “front door” for chumps dumb enough to try to “get in on your own.” Then there is the well-known “back door” to college, which is the corruption we’re all familiar with: giving tons of dough to a university in the hopes of getting your kid’s name to stand out in the admissions office. Sometimes this works. Twenty years ago, the New Jersey real estate mogul Charles Kushner gave $2.5 million to Harvard; a few months later, his son Jared got a place in the freshman class.

But Mr. Singer dismisses the back door. It costs “ten times as much money” — he’s right about that — and because it’s greased by connections and a certain kind of social class, “there’s no guarantees.” Instead, Mr. Singer explains that he has devised something cheaper and more certain. Something more like an app. By contracting the little people — not drivers looking to make a little extra scratch but college athletics coaches, test proctors and a university administrator — he had pried open a “side door” into college.

“My families want a guarantee,” he says. “So, if you said to me, ‘Here’s our grades, here’s our scores, here’s our ability, and we want to go to X school’ and you give me one or two schools, and then I’ll go after those schools and try to get a guarantee done.”

Is there any better metaphor for the injustice of the modern economy than Mr. Singer’s “side door”? One popular defense of rising inequality is that it hurts no one: Sure, rich people keep getting richer, but if everyone else is also getting richer, albeit more slowly, why should the masses care, other than jealousy?

Corruption, routine and pervasive, is why we should care.

As Bob Dylan put it: Money doesn’t talk, it swears. Excess wealth doesn’t just buy shiny things. It buys power and influence, it buys class and it buys permanence. It buys the corrupt certainty that every one of life’s problems might be evaded through some special side door, and it does so at the expense of not just the poor but all of us, shattering even the thin illusion of meritocracy that still somehow seduces American politics.

As Mr. Singer put it to his customers: “It’s the home run of home runs.”