But you deserve to raise it, because I thought when you published the book– and believe even more strongly now–that we are about to emerge from the long night of having no conceptual framework to do battle with the limited-government types. The financial crisis, Citizens United, and the Republican Congress are revealing “limited government” for what it is: a fig leaf over a truly oligarchical movement in American politics.

It’s been great watching you do battle on MSNBC.

Caught a lot of Grover Norquist on CSPAN last week, and was absolutely shocked by how well he can espouse the so-called virtues of fierce individualism—and how little he seems to recognize what a literal implementation of that society would do to its members who lacked the means to participate. The sound bites you hear on the news just don’t do this guy justice.

Grover’s Wikipedia page claims his devotion to this vision is “monk-like”, and that he doesn’t openly exploit his wealth. Were he to be forced to live the Allegory of the Long Spoons, however, I wonder how his position might change.

It’s sometimes said that the Democratic Party is the party of the poor and weak. I’m beginning to believe that it’s also the party of those who live in the real world—a world I didn’t realize was even there until I was forced to live in it for a time.

If we piled $100 bills – 5 reams (2500 sheets) would equal about one foot high.

Imagine we took a pile of money equivalent to less than the fortune of either Gates, Buffet, etc. – $50 billion – and started to make a stack of $100 bills that stood aside the Empire State Building.

The money would not run out when we hit the roof – 1250 feet above the street.

Nor would it run out at the second pile. Nor the 10th. Nor the 100th.

At the end of the 160th pile of $100 bills, each side by side, reaching 1250 feet high, we would finish our task.

The median American’s family money pile is less than 3″ high of the same $100 bills, far short of the 200,000 feet of just one of the super rich.