It is axiomatic among Marxists and Lefties that power and wealth are synonyms. If not synonyms, very closely overlapping circles.
This, fortunately, is complete nonsense. There is virtually no overlap between power and wealth. We just had a wonderful demonstration of this reality. Teresa Heinz and John Kerry. She is worth more than a billion dollars and is clearly a person of little or no power. He is a U.S. Senator, ostensibly one of the few hundred most powerful people in the world. But he isn’t any more powerful because of his wife’s money. He is less powerful than many other Senators who have little money.
I have had many wealthy clients, individuals as well as major families in the ranks of America’s top wealthiest. I have never detected even a modicum of power. In one case a daughter of wealth married a governor. Sort of Heinz-Kerry. I suspected the governor picked the woman for her money. Did anyone suspect that of John Kerry?
The most powerful person in America, possibly in the world, is Dick Cheney. He is individually far more powerful than the cumulative top hundred wealthiest people. He has modest wealth. Several million people in the U.S. are wealthier than Dick Cheney.
I couldn’t convince anyone of this fact. So I won’t try. I merely wanted to point out to the cognoscenti that the overlapping circles of power and wealth have a tiny overlapping area. Tiny, if it exists at all.
The reason is that the skills that create money and power are different skills and consequently the networks that people in each category use to exercise their skills are functionally different networks.
Historically people and classes with power have absorbed people with money. One consequence is that the European upper classes survived much longer than they would have otherwise. The bad consequence is that we had one hundred years of poorly managed European corporations. The same is true, to some extent, in Japan.