Money is something you can (sometimes) exchange for wealth, but it’s not wealth itself.
When I say sometimes I mean that there are things you can’t buy: what those things are change from place to place and time to time. The classic formulation of the preconditions for capitalism includes the ability to buy land, labor and capital. In most places and times you couldn’t actually hire most people to work–they were bound to the land, their clans, or whatever or they could support themselves and sure didn’t want to work for someone else.
Likewise most land was inherited or in the commons and definitely not for sale. You couldn’t buy it.
Wealth is what you control (not own, control) that can be used to make something, grow something or support violent people.
Violent people are what enable you to retain control, and this is as true now as it was in feudal times or ancient Sumeria. Property law and contracts and taxation and so on are all ultimately backed by the fact that if you don’t obey, unpleasant men with guns will show up and do horrible things to you.
In the dark and middle ages, those with a lot of money had sharp limits on how much power they had. The King of France famously destroyed the Knights Templar to get out of his debts to them and to steal their wealth. Henry the Eighth of England dissolved the monasteries and stole all their lands and wealth. Rich merchants regularly had their noble or royal patrons default on their debts and often wound up dead as a result.
Nor could they buy much in the way of land, or hire too many people. Right up to the middle of the 19th century, the standard pattern for a rich merchant was to either marry their heirs into the nobility or buy a patent of nobility, then get some land, and become a noble and give up most of their mercantile enterprises. These were sharp customers, they did this because they felt it was the only way to be secure and truly take care of their descendants.
In the modern world, when new money is created without an increase in actual productive ability (goods, resources, improvements in land, improved real productivity) wealth hasn’t been created. Wealth is only created by increases in money if there is unused productive capacity and that capacity is being held back by lack of money (i.e. it’s available, but not being used by the people who would use it productively) and that money gets to the people who would use it productively AND those people then get control of those resources and use them productively. (That’s a lot of “ands”.
We’ve been pumping a ton of money into the economy ever since 2008. It mostly, in the West, has not been used to increase production, it has been used either in attempts to gain control of already existing productive resources or to loot said productive resources, burning them to the ground, as with much of private equity. A good example is Toys’R’Us, which was entirely profitable till it was bought and larded up with debt by the buyers.
Money isn’t wealth. Sometimes, in some times and societies, it seems like it, but at best it is a proxy for wealth.
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