People don't understand money. I think if they did they would never allow people to amass millions and billions of dollars.
Here's my declaration: money is power. If you define power in a human social structure as the ability to get other people to follow your wishes, money definitely does that. Money is power that you can count. If a person has enough money, their power cuts through other considerations by subordinates like charisma or expertise. In fact, people will follow somebody with money to get money of their own, so they then get other people to do something for them.
If you question the premise of what power is, a good example I might give you is Josef Stalin. Why was he so feared? He was just a person. If he had been isolated from everyone else, he would have been no more dangerous than a single man. Yet, he was formidable because of how many people would follow his orders or even his wishes. According to history, everyone was happy when he died. Yet, nobody would kill him, nor even imprison him. A fear that everyone else would defend to the death, and would destroy not just turncoat, but all of the person's family and friends. With the purges, where Stalin's accomplices would kill anybody who might have been thinking about betrayal, people became even afraid of thinking about overthrowing the leader.
That was a power structure held together by terror. Money, however, is as sufficient, and it's more humane. Yet, we ought to notice just how much power we're delegating to the wealthy by letting them make money without limit. This raises a question: can we do anything? That I will have to leave for another posting.
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