You can't defeat that by trying to reduce the wealth of the rich. There will always super rich people outside your jurisdiction who you can't tax and who can exert influence, and super rich people in your jurisdiction who evade your taxing authorities through legal means and secrecy, or simply because your taxes are not high enough to prevent them from acquiring massively more wealth than the average person.
Trying to reduce the influence of money on politics by reducing large concentrations of wealth is like trying to stop a boat from sinking by boiling the ocean away. The solution is to plug the holes in the boat's hull, which means closing the avenues through which money affects the electoral and political process, not to destroy the wealth generation process by repealing the reward for creating wealth.
>>What if the super rich form an anticompetitive cartel? what if their very existence will inevitably mean that who you know will matter more than your skills, your hard work, and good ideas?
Fortunately that's not how the world works. The rich are far too numerous to create any kind of sustainable pact. They compete fiercely with each other in the market, which is why wages have grown 20 fold over the last 200 years, and grown faster globally over the last 20 years than in any time in history.
The exception to this is politically coordinated government intervention like the kind that emanates from regulatory capture, which undermines contract liberty and the ability that provides to reject or defect from a pact.