A few weeks ago I had the good fortune to spend two days vacationing on Nantucket. It was the first time I'd traveled to the 30-mile playground for the rich, where John and Teresa Heinz Kerry rub elbows with Jack Welch and Tim Russert, and $5.9 million buys you a nice house - inland.

No surprise: Nantucket is a lovely place, with beautiful beaches and tasteful homes, top restaurants and eclectic shops.

It's also, despite the choking presence of big cars on small roads, quite peaceful, a nice change from the fast pace of the newsroom.

Still, Nantucket left a bad taste in my mouth.

At first, I wasn't sure why that was the case. Was it, I wondered, the unremarkable brown purse being sold for $5,000? The woman at a cocktail party who told my uncle, "There are some great bargains if you look - my friend found a twelve-million dollar place for ten"?

Was it all those men looking like Easter eggs in their pastel pants?

Or was it - dare I say - the money?

Bingo.

Now, I have nothing against money; in fact, I rather like it. (Absence makes the heart grow fonder after all, and The Sun Chronicle ain't Goldman Sachs.)

However, I think Francis Bacon was right when he said, "Money is like manure; of very little use except it be spread."

Our country is doing less and less of that spreading.

Corporate profits have skyrocketed over the past six years. So have the income of the wealthiest Americans. Meanwhile, median family income is stagnant or even falling, while the cost of health care - and gas, and food, and housing - isn't.

The best comparison, though, is retail. Upscale chains like Neiman Marcus and Nordstrom boast soaring sales year after year, while Wal-Mart and other down-market outlets see weakening demand. It seems their very different customers are having very different experiences.

And I wouldn't be surprised if quite a few of those big-spending Neiman Marcus shoppers are buying beach towels to take with them on a summer excursion to Nantucket. As if to confirm that, a few days after I returned The New York Times ran a story about two dozen Nantucket homeowners who are putting up $25 million of their own money to beat back the sea, which is eroding the beach in front of their homes. (For the mathematically challenged, that's about $1 million each.)

A week later, the same paper reported that the barons of private equity who head up the Blackstone firm had engineered a staggeringly complicated scheme to avoid paying taxes - any taxes - on the cool $3.7 billion they pocketed taking the company public in June.

Finally, in a recent Sunday edition, The Times spelled out exactly what its more discerning readers had already surmised: namely, that the reemergence of "concentrated wealth has made the early years of the 21st century truly another Gilded Age."

And what better spot to catch the scent of all that money than Nantucket? Once the home of Vanderbilts, Mellons, and duPonts, today it's once again an island in more than the physical sense: an oasis of wealth in an insecure nation.

I wonder, though, how long it can last.

The first Gilded Age sparked a powerful backlash of reformist legislation, championed by Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Antitrust laws broke up the big monopolies of the late 19th century, and the new income tax took a bite out of the über-capitalists' returns.

Today, the beginnings of another backlash are coming into view.

Senator Chuck Grassley, a Republican from Iowa who's no socialist, wants to eliminate a bizarre legal loophole that taxes wealthy hedge fund managers at the capital gains rate of 15 percent, rather than the wage rate of 35 percent.

This week, for the first time in 10 years, the federal minimum wage went up - though only from a pitiful $5.15 to a still-pitiful $5.85. Still, it's a start.

And the price of admission to the Democratic presidential race is a pledge to make sure everyone in America receives health care, regardless of their job or income.

Powerful forces will always fight these sorts of proposals. That only makes sense, since doing so is in their self-interest. But I, for one, hope we do build a more egalitarian America down the road.

And if we do, at least the wealthy can tell each other: "We'll always have Nantucket."

TED NESI is a staff writer for The Sun Chronicle. He can be reached at tnesi@thesunchronicle.com.