JOSEPH STIGLITZ, an economics professor at Columbia University with a Nobel prize and stints at the White House and the World Bank on his gold-encrusted CV, takes to the perfumed pages of Vanity Fair to decry the alleged rule "Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%". Mr Stiglitz's essay, though riddled with error and confusion, remains an illuminating encapsulation of a certain misguided conception of political economy common on the left.

Scott Winship does us the service of ferreting out Mr Stiglitz's false and misleading claims. The share of national income and wealth accruing to the top 1% has not grown as much as Mr Stiglitz asserts. Median income has declined only if one omits the value of health benefits. The claim that "All the growth in recent decades—and more—has gone to those at the top", is plainly incorrect. There is little evidence that increasing levels of inequality "undermine the efficiency of the economy". Mr Stiglitz maintains that it is "well-documented" that high levels of inequality lead "people outside the top 1 percent" to "increasingly live beyond their means", but the increase in indebtedness is small, and theories, such as Robert Frank's, connecting middle-class consumption and indebtedness to rising inequality remain speculative. There's more, but fact-checking is tedious business. Please do read Mr Winship's post for the details.

I'm more interested in the deep commitments framing Mr Stiglitz's essay. Mr Stiglitz offers yet another voicing of the progressive master narrative: that economic inequality becomes political inequality, empowering the richest to bend the political process to their will at the expence of the commonweal. "Wealth begets power, which begets more wealth", as Mr Stiglitz pithily puts it. Progressives thrill to this sort of vague slogan, but we are rarely offered an intelligible explanation of how exactly wealth begets power, nor are we offered an intelligible approach to reducing the power of wealth over policy and politics.

Mr Stiglitz writes:

Monopolies and near monopolies have always been a source of economic power—from John D. Rockefeller at the beginning of the last century to Bill Gates at the end. Lax enforcement of anti-trust laws, especially during Republican administrations, has been a godsend to the top 1 percent. Much of today's inequality is due to manipulation of the financial system, enabled by changes in the rules that have been bought and paid for by the financial industry itself—one of its best investments ever. The government lent money to financial institutions at close to 0 percent interest and provided generous bailouts on favorable terms when all else failed. Regulators turned a blind eye to a lack of transparency and to conflicts of interest.

I agree with all of this. But, pray tell, what does it have to do with inequality? Would reducing inequality to, say, Canadian levels by means of progressive redistribution help? No, it would not. Making rich people poorer and poor people richer won't strip the financial industry of the resources needed to "buy" the regulations and regulators it wants. So what does Mr Stiglitz propose we do? He doesn't say, but I'll hazard a guess: get better regulators—regulators who see things Joe Stiglitz's way. If you sense that this is not a serious answer to a serious problem, you are correct. Indeed, it is plausible that economic technocrats such as Mr Stiglitz bear no small part of the blame for the corrupt and baleful state of the financial economy.

As Gabriel Sherman writes in a new New York Magazine article on Peter Orszag and the revolving door between Washington and Wall Street, "The close alliance among Wall Street and the economics departments of the major universities and the West Wing of the White House is the military-industrial complex of our time." Not to say that the military-industrial complex is not the military-industrial complex of our times, nor that the confluence of government and health care is not the military-industrial complex of our times. The problem is that we are multiplying military-industrial complexes. But this explosion in public-private "partnerships", and the inevitable political corruption and economic distortion they produce, is not at bottom due to a plot of the top 1%. It is due in no small part to the success of progressive ideologues like Mr Stiglitz in arguing for ever greater government control over everything.

A political system that enshrines governments' power to grant monopolies and other barriers to economic competition, whether they be direct subsidies to government's chosen champion firms, or less direct subsidies by way of taxes, tariffs, and regulations that disproportionately harm less-favoured firms, inevitably attracts money to politics. Under close inspection, the progressive master narrative is revealed as a tail-chasing, self-consuming progressive Ouroboros. It is an argument against money in politics that argues for precisely the sort of government power that draws money to politics.

The progressive master narrative runs on the fuel of class interest, but it makes an arbitrary exception for members of the progressive technocratic elite, like Mr Stiglitz. This is the loophole through which the Ouroboros escapes self-cannibalism. These men and women, the technocratic elite, in virtue of their superior moral rectitude and mastery of the relevant social science may be trusted with almost unlimited power to manage the nation's economy, wars, and far-flung imperial holdings on behalf of the democratic public. Sure, these godlike king-making powers make professional courtiers of the money men, but not to worry. The public-minded technocrat pledges in his heart of hearts to express only the will of the people, especially the least among us. Thus our Joe Stiglitzes and Samantha Powerses, desiring nothing but the best all of us, stand arm in arm as a sturdy bulwark against the tide of money that threatens to corrupt our politics. Of course, at times the wishes of the people diverge from the opinion of the technocrats. In which case, we cannot but suspect that public opinion has been manipulated by the rich, or by "market fundamentalist" ideologues financed by rich people, such that, as Mr Stiglitz puts it "one big part of the reason we have so much inequality is that the top 1 percent want it that way". If the financial system collapses and cripples the economy, if the American military gets bogged down in a blood-soaked trillion-dollar quagmire, that's because the technocrats in or near positions of power had too little influence, not too much. Or they were the wrong technocrats. Or, if all this seems too far-fetched ... Look! Over there! Inequality!

The nexus of politics and big money is a profound problem, but inequality is at best a manifestation of the problem, not the problem. Inequality is a red herring that draws our attention away from the real, hard task that faces truly public-spirited reformers: how to fix the corrupt and corrupting interface between America's economic and political institutions. We may hope for, but should not expect, useful, impartial advice in this regard from powerful academics holding golden key-cards to the revolving door. And we may hope for, but should not expect, useful advice in this regard from progressives dizzy from chasing their tails. So, instead, we get righteous rants about the injustice and danger of inequality. But should the American public suddenly sweeten to the idea of greater downward redistribution, sending America's Gini coefficient tumbling toward the sweet valley of social justice, it would do little or nothing to alter the venal incentives that account for the multiplying host of military-industrial complexes spreading across America like a cancer.