THE POWER OF MONEY

Es ist eine alte Geschichte, doch bleibt es immer neu… (Heine)

When money becomes power, this power is inevitably and infinitely more obnoxious and pernicious than the power of the sword or the power of tradition, not to mention the generally ephemeral power of Plato’s or Francis Bacon’s knowledge.

In the hoary past, money and power were usually separated, as the powerful detested “finance.” In modern times, money and power continue to be separated in Russia, while under pure socialist systems money has very little value to begin with. It is not hard to deduce from the general outline of history that a merger of money and power somehow coincides with the full-blown emergence of financial capitalism, but nostalgia for the good old days before the world plunged into its first “world” war is not advisable until we acquaint ourselves with this Lord Byron’s complaint dating back to the pre-Victorian age:

Who hold the balance of the world? Who reign

O’er conquerors, whether royalist or liberal?

Who rouse the shirtless patriots of Spain?

(That make old Europe’s journals squeak and gibber all.)

Who keep the world, both Old and New, in pain

Or pleasure? Who make politics run glibber all?

The shade of Buonaparte’s noble darling?

Jew Rothschild, and his fellow Christian Baring.

Thus, according to Byron, the evils of financial capitalist power ought not to be somehow attributed to the evil vapors of the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries. A statement of record!

All I have to do now is to repeat my opening verse. Apparently, “es ist eine alte Geschichte, doch bleibt es immer neu!” (And, incidentally, I will take Heine over the Rothschilds anytime! But that’s me, of course.)