From Robert W. McChesney's "Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy":

It is difficult to reconcile such extreme inequality with anything but a superficial democracy. Ironically the one issue that best demonstrates that may be inequality itself. Michael Norton of Harvard Business School and Dan Ariely of Duke created a survey to determine what Americans considered a desirable level of inequality in society. They looked at wealth, rather than income; wealth refers basically to one’s capital and savings, so it is the measure of real economic power in a capitalist society. When Ariely and Norton asked thousands of Americans to give their ideal wealth distribution, they described, on average, a nation where the wealth distribution looks not like that of the United States but of Sweden, only more so—the wealthiest quintile would control just 32 percent of the wealth, the poorest just over 10 percent. In the present-day United States, the top quintile has 84 percent of the wealth, and the poorest has 0.1 percent of the wealth. Even 90 percent of the respondents who voted for George W. Bush in 2004 opted for Swedish wealth distribution. “People dramatically underestimated the extent of wealth inequality in the U.S.,” says Ariely. “And they wanted it to be even more equal” than Sweden’s. ((Drake Bennett, “Commentary: The Inequality Delusion,” BloombergBusinessweek.com, Oct. 21, 2010; and Linda McQuaig and Neil Brooks, Billionaires’ Ball: Gluttony and Hubris in an Age of Epic Inequality (Boston: Beacon Press, 2012), 214–15.))

Yet despite these values, wealth and income inequality is effectively off the table in American politics—an absolute nonstarter—except for periodic rhetorical flourishes by Democrats when elections draw near. What proposals do get a hearing, like the so-called Buffett rule in 2012—which would have applied a minimum income tax of 30 percent to people making more than a million dollars a year—would have been dream legislation for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in 1965, when the minimum rate for the rich was about 67 percent. Such has been the corruption of American politics since then. But the problem of economic inequality goes even wider and deeper. A mountain of research has been generated in the past decade on the consequences of growing inequality for the health of American society—or any nation, for that matter. Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s "The Spirit Level" has earned justifiable acclaim for its documentation of how increasing inequality—far more than simply the actual amount of wealth in the elites of society—damages almost every measure of well-being, from life expectancy and mental health to violence and human happiness. This is largely true for the very rich, ironically enough, as well as the poor. People and cultures thrive in more egalitarian societies. ((Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2009).))

I don't blame anybody for wanting to live in a free society. Remember, the main reason for capitalism is to accrue power and wealth, in a fascistic guise; the power is almost always top-down, and seldom leads to people partaking in legislation and direct action on how to run the country. We can, but as of yet, capitalism has led to appx. 60 families owning half of the monetary assets in the world.

McChesney, the author of this book, takes in a slew of pros and cons in regards to capitalism, and how it affects democracy for all in the digital age. It's clearly an informed book. I strongly recommend hearing his speech named "Capitalism in the Age of Digital Technology".