Conservative intellectuals often cite individual liberty — defined as the freedom of contract and from arbitrary coercion — as the guiding principle of their politics. But Americans will never enjoy such liberty if they cannot meaningfully influence their contractual obligations to the state; which is to say, the laws that they are coerced into obeying. As the great American political scientist Robert Dahl once wrote, “one of the most fundamental of all human freedoms” is “the freedom to help determine, in cooperation with others, the laws and rules that one must obey.” America’s present level of economic inequality is incompatible with that freedom.