It's All About Money

I seem to remember learning in school that the increased use of money had a lot to do with breaking up the old feudal system. Employment opportunities were limited in those days, you could either be a soldier, a tenant farmer, or a cleric. In each case, you have nothing to trade for your room and board except your personal loyalty to some powerful leader. Money gives you bargaining power, and it's portable.

Probably the first people to make extensive use of money were the shopkeepers and tradesmen, closely followed by the money lenders, who evolved into bankers. Christians were not supposed to lend money for interest to other Christians, so the Jews became the money lenders by default. I'm not sure when money began to convey political power, maybe it always did. Governments have always issued money to pay for their wars. In the Middle Ages, governments were fragmented and land became the repository of wealth. As governments coalesced out of the chaos of feudalism, money must have started to edge out real estate as the medium of exchange.

I'm not sure how democracy plays into this, but rich people generally have more political power than poor people. It seems natural then, that the more the money is spread around, the more the political power would be diffused among the populace. There is a lot of talk nowadays about the way money seems to be re concentrating itself into the hands of fewer and fewer people, but I'm not so sure about that. Yeah the rich are getting richer, but are the poor getting poorer? Even if the average poor person is poorer than his predecessors, if there are more poor people, then their total combined wealth might outweigh the total combined wealth of the rich people because there are so few of them. Similarly, the political power of the poor might grow to the point of eclipsing the political power of the rich, if the poor people could ever get organized and all vote the same way. Lots of luck with that one!