We cannot have a representative government with democratic rights and allow people to hoard as much money as they can grab. You cannot have an impartial judiciary, a cogent legislature, or an un-corrupted president. Not while the government power has to compete with economic power, and not when government is so easily captured by moneyed interests. Economic power is too easily leveraged into political power.
I remember the definition of money given in high school classes as a "medium of exchange." Wikipedia defines money just:
"Money is any item or verifiable record that is generally accepted as payment for goods and services and repayment of debts, such as taxes, in a particular country or socio-economic context.[1][2][3] The main functions of money are distinguished as: a medium of exchange, a unit of account, a store of value and sometimes, a standard of deferred payment.[4][5] Any item or verifiable record that fulfils these functions can be considered as money."
I beg to differ with experts about this: money is power, first and foremost. If power in human affairs is defined as the ability to get others to follow your will/wishes, whether to compel them or persuade them in other ways, money is power. It's different from other types of power in that you can count it because laws of mathematics apply to it.
Money is also the world's oldest sustained social program. The first coins were issued by Lydia. The king's head stamped on it meant the King was guaranteeing the amount of gold or silver in the coin. James Burke in his 1970s PBS series Connections tells how the touchstone could be used to determine the amount of gold in a coin.
At the time, it democratized power and diversified the ways of getting it through production of goods and providing of services that earned it. Early accounting also provided a means to determine the responsibility. "Follow the money" is a practice as old as currency itself. It also multiplied the ways people could cooperate. Contracts became written, with the exact amount of money specified.
A neglected quality that money has that shouldn't need to be expounded, but does is due to the fog of ideology: money is a government program.
Libertarian efforts to uncouple currency from government have so far failed, and I think they will continue to fail, miserably. Bitcoins are good scams, ransoms, and money laundering, but not much else. They're also good for speculating if you like to gamble at unknown odds. By making all transactions private and closed to scrutiny, it becomes somewhat like having a tree falling in the woods. The transaction doesn't exist until it's exchanged out of bitcoins and into a real currency. Going into why they'll is really beyond the scope of this essay.
But now we find ourselves in a position of such great wealth disparity that our system has stagnated and is breaking down. Think about this: any solvable social problem we have always hits and impasse in the same place: taxing the wealthy. Since the wealthy are the only people today who have substantial money, if tax revenues can't be collected from them, or their wealth can't be bounded, social progress will stagnate. This is what happens with any national or international issue you raise. It happens with our crumbled infrastructure, it happens with health care, it happens with criminal justice reform, it happens with environmental problems. We use the word "corporate" to shift blame to a faceless entity, but the wealthy are behind the corporations.
Our country, our society is going to collapse if excess wealth can't be controlled. Right now, the financiers and banks are the gatekeepers to wealth. They know what sort of person they'd trust with a loan. People Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos who are obsessive and fanatical about making money, no matter the cost to the workers and to their environment. In other words: conservative capitalist. They'll also capture government agencies and elected officials.
The notion that billionaires are better than everyone else has to die. This is difficult to do, because they're powerful people, and human beings are awed with power no matter the source and means.
