Money doesn’t buy happiness, we’re told. Even some economists agree. The Nobel Prize-winning economists, Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton, once proposed that rising income increased people’s emotional wellbeing only up to a ceiling of about $115,000 in today’s money.

They probably hadn’t met many billionaires. The ultra-rich may not pursue happiness in the joyful sense of the word. But they will try every trick in the book to hang on to their stash and woe befall the tax authority that tries to lay a finger on their treasure.

And this poses one of the most intractable challenges not only to the solvency of the American state, but to the survival of American democracy.

From the technological Olympus of Silicon Valley to the urban canyons of Wall Street, a narrow club of vastly wealthy plutocrats sits on a ballooning share of the nation’s resources.…