The Almightier by Paul Vigna How Money Became God, Greed Became Virtue, and Debt Became Sin
What's it about?
The Almightier (2025) uncovers how the invention of money went from being a tool that served a useful purpose to a system that has taken on religious importance. It also shows how we can just as easily change that relationship and how history may point the way to a fairer future.
Money, at its core, isn’t real. Money is what it is because of a shared belief. Our collective act of faith is what gives value to bits of paper, digital entries, or pieces of shiny metals. But over the years, money has gone from a useful tool in building civilizations to being the be-all and end-all in our lives. Greed has evolved from a condemnable vice into a celebrated virtue, and wealth has become our unspoken religion. The problem is, money was never built to be a religion, and unlike faith in something higher, it doesn’t offer redemption – only accumulation.
We now live in a post-scarcity world where the resources and technology already exist to feed, house, educate, and power the entire planet. But as long as money remains both our main incentive and our main gatekeeper, we’ll keep missing the chance to build a society where life, liberty, and happiness are within reach for everyone. Understanding how our money mindset evolved is the first step toward finally outgrowing it. So let’s see how this story unfolded.
Picture Uruk, one of the world’s first great cities, thriving between 3500 and 2000 BCE. Inside its walls are around 8,000 residents. People are farming, fishing, trading, and gathering in taverns after work. At its center stands a temple, which functions both as a place of worship and the hub of political authority and economic control.
The temple oversees resources, directing the flow of goods in service to the gods. Wealth takes the form of grain, silver, gold, or livestock, and most transactions are recorded on clay tablets as credit. Debts can be settled with harvests, labor, or even indentured servitude. In this system, owing money is a moral as well as a financial failure, a disruption of cosmic order that demands correction.
This early economy gave rise to the interest-bearing loan and soon to compound interest, tools that made lenders powerful but risked destabilizing society. To prevent collapse, rulers periodically wiped debts clean in decrees known as amargi – or “return to mother.” These proclamations freed bondservants and restored lands, a tradition echoed centuries later in the Hebrew Bible’s Jubilee year. Such debt-erasing resets kept inequality from growing beyond repair.
By the seventh century BCE, coins arrived, making wealth a portable, standardized medium, fueling trade and expanding the pursuit of riches. Aristotle later reflected on these changes, framing money as a human invention that served society when used for exchange but degraded it when hoarded or multiplied through interest. Yet he also celebrated “magnificence,” the idea that wealthy, magnificent men should help society by funding grand public works.
As we’ll see in the sections ahead, magnificence blurred into self-justification, and the pursuit of wealth took on a moral gloss. Greed evolved from vice to ambition and eventually to virtue.
The biggest roadblock to this evolution arrived a little over 2,000 years ago. His message was so powerful that it became a religion.
Let’s set the scene in Jerusalem, 2,000 years ago. A wandering carpenter named Yeshua – passionate, radical, and utterly convinced of God’s law. Part of that law was that wealth was a barrier to God’s kingdom, and that he was in Jerusalem to erase the debts that were crushing the poor.
At the heart of Yeshua’s message was the Golden Rule: treat others as you would want to be treated yourself. That principle had echoed through ancient civilizations for millennia, but in Yeshua’s hands it became the cornerstone of his moral revolution. Would you want to lose your land, your livelihood, or be sold into slavery over a debt? No. God’s law demanded something better – compassion, equality, and the forgiveness of crushing debts.
Yeshua took this message to Jerusalem’s temple – the economic heart of Judea. He braided together a whip and stormed into the temple, driving out the merchants and lenders. He and his followers occupied the temple for days, teaching God’s law and most likely destroying debt records in the process. In that moment, Yeshua wasn’t just a preacher – he was a captivating, revolutionary king. But for the Roman authorities, he was a dangerous contagion that had to be stopped and made an example of.
After his death, the dream of debt jubilees faded. Yet early Christianity carried forward his deep mistrust of greed. Church fathers like St. Jerome and St. Aquinas condemned usury – the practice of making loans and creating debt – and medieval law capped interest rates.
But then came the Black Death, shattering Europe’s feudal order. In the wreckage, a hunger for new ideas, rebirth, and reconstruction bloomed. In Florence, a preacher named Antoninus reframed Aristotle’s concept of “magnificence” for the Christian elite: use your wealth for public works, and your money becomes virtuous. A new argument arose: maybe greed – or avarice – wasn’t just inevitable but essential. Without it, would there be cities? Art? Or any civilization at all?
This was a turning point. This defense of greed gave people a moral license to pursue profit, so long as they could frame their gains as benefiting society. Yeshua’s rebellion was slipping away, replaced by the belief that the pursuit of more is natural and good.
By 25, Cosimo de’ Medici was already a name whispered in Florence’s taverns and marketplaces. His father, Giovanni, had built the Medici Bank into a trusted institution with clients as lofty as the pope, but Cosimo wasn’t content to simply inherit. Over the next 40 years, he transformed the family’s modest business into a European financial powerhouse and effectively ruled Florence as an uncrowned king.
But what set Cosimo apart was how he used his wealth. He turned his private fortune into public magnificence. Inspired by Aristotle’s “Magnificent Man,” he funded libraries, churches, and grand works of art, binding his legacy to Florence’s very architecture.
But the influence of the Medici family didn’t stop there. In 1531, Giovanni di Lorenzo de’ Medici became Pope Leo X. And he brought his family’s taste for grandeur with him. Leo raised money aggressively, selling indulgences – absolution for sins – in some of the most brazen marketing campaigns the church had ever run. Johann Tetzel, the most notorious indulgence-seller, promised that coins in the coffer could spring souls from purgatory.
This open commodification of salvation provoked outrage. On October 31, 1517, Martin Luther condemned these indulgences as a mockery of true repentance. His challenge cracked the church’s unity, sparking the Protestant Reformation and dividing Europe.
Among the Reformers was John Calvin, whose theology reconfigured the relationship between money and morality. Calvin preached that all blessings, including wealth, came from God. So there was nothing wrong with amassing wealth, though he also believed that the rich had a divine duty to give generously.
The not-so-subtle difference in Calvinism was that he believed the haves and the have-nots were both examples of divine will. The fact that some people were blessed with money and others weren’t – again, it was all just part of God’s plan.
Calvinism also laid the intellectual foundation for what later became known as the Protestant Work Ethic. That ethic linked labor and making money directly to divine purpose. Work was a calling from God. Increasingly, money – the measure of productivity – was itself becoming a measure of piety, and diligence a form of worship.
When Constantinople fell to the Ottomans in 1453, it cut off European trade routes to Asia, forcing them to look for sea routes instead. This marked the dawn of the Age of Exploration, famously driven by “gold, God, and glory.” Wealth and religion had become so intertwined that if riches were seen as a sign of divine favor, then seizing them – by any means – was not only acceptable but righteous.
Columbus’s 1492 return from the Bahamas, filled with tales of gold, ignited a frenzy. Explorers like Hernando de Soto followed, combining military force with relentless extraction. In just a century after Columbus’s arrival, the population of the Americas plummeted from around 50 million to 8 million, driven largely by European diseases and exploitation.
Here, the idea of “beneficial greed” collapsed into pure, unrestrained greed. Any act in pursuit of profit became justified, and the labor shortage created by the decimation of Indigenous peoples led Europeans to import enslaved Africans. Slavery wasn’t new, but in the Americas it grew to an unprecedented scale and brutality, driven almost entirely by economics.
Over time, colonizers constructed elaborate moral and pseudo-scientific justifications for slavery. Africans’ relative immunity to disease was twisted into proof they were “born” for servitude. Clergymen cherry-picked scripture to defend bondage, while nineteenth-century US laws in many slave states declared that Blackness itself was evidence of enslavement. These arguments fused money, power, and religion into a single system where profit was further equated with God’s will.
This mindset sanctified centuries of plunder across three continents. Even after the Civil War ended legal slavery in the United States, the economic and ideological foundations of racial oppression endured. The racism embedded in American society today is the direct descendant of an era when greed wasn’t just unchecked but preached as holy doctrine.
By the eighteenth century, Europe’s money-driven order was showing its cracks. In the Americas, Native populations were being decimated, Africans were enslaved, and at home, inequality was stretching society to its limits. Could it be that greed – once sold as a civilizing force – was leaving deep, lasting damage?
In 1755, the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau claimed as much in his searing critique Discourse on Inequality. A Protestant Calvinist, Rousseau envisioned a society where leaders and citizens shared aligned interests, without fear of being cheated. But the world he saw was built on hoarding wealth, exploiting the masses, and elevating the few at everyone else’s expense.
In Rousseau’s view, it was money that shattered equality and had created a world where power justified theft and poverty justified taking. Inequality wasn’t nature’s design; it was humanity’s creation.
But two decades later, in 1776, Adam Smith provided industrialists with their counterpoint in The Wealth of Nations. Smith reframed commerce as a pragmatic, almost scientific system. He argued that the division of labor multiplied productivity and that “civilized” economies could offer even their poorest members more security than so-called “savage” societies. Yet he wasn’t naïve – he distrusted elites who manipulated laws for their own gain and saw organized religion as another oppressive force. Commerce, he believed, could break the church’s grip and create fairer opportunities.
And yet, one of Smith’s most famous ideas – the “invisible hand” – is also his most religious idea. In fact, it has become capitalism’s mantra, treated as an endorsement for pure self-interest: if everyone seeks their own gain, the invisible hand will sort things accordingly, and society will prosper. The invisible hand was clearly God’s hand, guiding wealth and poverty alike as divine will. And with it, Smith gave businessmen a new creed: commerce as god, profit as its highest virtue.
After the Revolution, America was broke and unstable. The central government had next to zero authority. There was no power to tax, no strong judiciary, and, most importantly for the wealthy creditor class, no real way to enforce debt collection. Most currency was worthless anyway.
This set the stage for the age-old showdown between creditors and debtors. A popular uprising in Massachusetts known as Shays's Rebellion was put to a violent end, but for the land-owning elite, this was a nightmare. These men hadn’t fought a revolution to lose control of their wealth to mobs of armed farmers. They needed a stronger system to protect their interests. The answer would be the US Constitution.
A century later, historian Charles Beard would blow up the romantic founding myth. He argued the Constitution wasn’t about liberty for all – it was about safeguarding property for the few. The new nation’s “godhead” wasn’t equality. It was money. James Madison is even quoted as saying that protecting wealth was the first order of government.
In general, economics was becoming less humane and more about number crunching. Britain’s Thomas Malthus did some math and concluded that since population grows exponentially and food supply grows linearly, that means famine, poverty, and death are inevitable. Not only that, helping the poor will only make things worse. This hot take fueled centuries of anti-welfare rhetoric and even justified eugenics.
Around the same time, getting a green light to be greedy got an unwitting boost from Charles Darwin. Darwin’s thoughts on evolution was its own bombshell, but it had a dangerous business-world distortion called Social Darwinism. If evolution naturally selects the fittest to survive, the titans of industry argued, then business “winners” were meant to win. It was Calvinism without God – Rockefeller and Vanderbilt could swap divine predestination for “natural law” and keep the same moral permission slip for ruthless behavior.
By the late nineteenth century, men like Carnegie, Vanderbilt, and Rockefeller – none of them born to royalty – were proof that this new creed could elevate anyone to staggering heights. Greed was something we could all believe in.
Meanwhile, in the mid-1800s, Europe was a hotbed of uprisings due to growing inequality. Bold new ideas were sprouting, and one of the loudest voices belonged to 30-year-old Karl Marx, a newspaper editor in Cologne, Germany.
In The Communist Manifesto, Marx described history as one long brawl between classes – the oppressors and the oppressed. Marx’s economic insight was sharp: capital wasn’t money, it was labor. Workers didn’t just produce goods – they produced capital itself. Without them, owners had nothing to invest, no machinery to run, no profits to hoard. The system demeaned the very source of its wealth.
But unlike in Europe or parts of Asia, Marxism never really seized political power in America. There were labor unions, but workers wanted a better deal – not a revolution. In the US, industrialists and laborers were often sitting in different pews in the same church of capitalism.
Speaking of capitalism, another German economist-sociologist, Max Weber, gave capitalism another layer of spiritual scaffolding. He acknowledged that science had replaced religion as society’s organizing principle, but it failed to answer the “why” of human life. The solution was capitalism, which framed hard work and wealth as signs of divine favor. In Weber’s telling, capitalism wasn’t just an economic system – it was a moral one, capable of filling the existential void.
Picking up where Weber left off was the writer Ayn Rand, who brings this six-century evolution to a close. Born in Russia in 1905, she fled the Bolsheviks and their disastrous attempts to abolish money. In her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, Rand strips capitalism of any lingering moral obligation to others. Selfishness isn’t just permissible – it’s the only virtue. Her philosophy of Objectivism rejects altruism outright. The individual is all that matters. The hero of her book, John Galt, is a capitalist messiah, presiding over a utopia where the cross has literally been replaced with a solid-gold dollar sign.
With Rand’s unabashed worship of greed, the transformation was complete. Money was now the organizing principle of society, finally mythologized as its own religion. Which is why, when Gordon Gekko declared in Oliver Stone’s 1987 movie Wall Street that “greed is good,” it landed like gospel.
Throughout history, people have stared at inequality and asked the same thing: Can’t we do better? The truth is, we can and we should. Aristotle knew 2,000 years ago that money is a human creation, and if it distorts society, we have both the right and the duty to change it.
That change begins with the oldest rule – the one that takes us full circle: treat others as you’d want to be treated. Centuries of glorifying greed have pulled us far from that simple principle. The belief that unrestrained greed benefits everyone has eroded our sense of mutual reliance. Ironically enough, the reminder is right there on the US dollar – e pluribus unum, “out of many, one.” Working together isn’t ideology; it’s common sense, the foundation of shared prosperity.
As for rebuilding the financial system, let’s start with interest rates. Predatory rates such as 25 to 35 percent on credit cards and 15 percent on student loans are legalized exploitation. For centuries, civilizations capped such rates; we should do the same. Jacob Coxey’s early twentieth-century vision of government-run banks lending at 2 percent could be revived with modern tools, including direct Federal Reserve accounts for all citizens. That would mean higher returns, lower fees, greater stability, and freedom from payday lenders.
Debt is the biggest stranglehold of all. The global debt is over $300 trillion. Much of it will never be repaid, and it’s crippling to vulnerable nations. A modern debt jubilee – paying creditors with newly created money, controlling inflation with temporary price caps, and resetting the system – could free both nations and individuals. It’s not unheard of. After the Second World War, forgiving Germany’s and Japan’s debts fueled their rise into global economic powers.
Money and debt are human inventions; they were never meant to be eternal chains. We can reinvent them to unburden the poorest, unlock growth, and foster cooperation. The power to act is in our hands – and always has been.
In this lesson to The Almightier by Paul Vigna, you’ve learned that there’s been a 5,000-year entanglement of money, power, religion, and morality. This trajectory shows how an invention meant to facilitate trade became a force that shapes and often distorts societies.
Starting at the temple economies of ancient Uruk, where debt carried moral weight and periodic jubilees reset the social balance, the story has evolved over centuries from the church forbidding usury to the beneficial greed of the Renaissance.
Doubts over the morality of creating wealth for wealth’s sake were overshadowed by influential works like Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Protestant ethics and quasi-religious ideas like the “invisible hand” helped reframe the pursuit of wealth as not just acceptable, but virtuous. By the modern era, greed had been stripped of moral restraints, embedded in capitalism, and justified as the engine of progress.
But it is in our power to change our relationship with money and reduce the inequality the current system has brought. Capping interest rates and resetting debt aren’t utopian dreams but proven tools for stability and growth.
The Almightier (2025) uncovers how the invention of money went from being a tool that served a useful purpose to a system that has taken on religious importance. It also shows how we can just as easily change that relationship and how history may point the way to a fairer future.
Money, at its core, isn’t real. Money is what it is because of a shared belief. Our collective act of faith is what gives value to bits of paper, digital entries, or pieces of shiny metals. But over the years, money has gone from a useful tool in building civilizations to being the be-all and end-all in our lives. Greed has evolved from a condemnable vice into a celebrated virtue, and wealth has become our unspoken religion. The problem is, money was never built to be a religion, and unlike faith in something higher, it doesn’t offer redemption – only accumulation.
We now live in a post-scarcity world where the resources and technology already exist to feed, house, educate, and power the entire planet. But as long as money remains both our main incentive and our main gatekeeper, we’ll keep missing the chance to build a society where life, liberty, and happiness are within reach for everyone. Understanding how our money mindset evolved is the first step toward finally outgrowing it. So let’s see how this story unfolded.
Picture Uruk, one of the world’s first great cities, thriving between 3500 and 2000 BCE. Inside its walls are around 8,000 residents. People are farming, fishing, trading, and gathering in taverns after work. At its center stands a temple, which functions both as a place of worship and the hub of political authority and economic control.
The temple oversees resources, directing the flow of goods in service to the gods. Wealth takes the form of grain, silver, gold, or livestock, and most transactions are recorded on clay tablets as credit. Debts can be settled with harvests, labor, or even indentured servitude. In this system, owing money is a moral as well as a financial failure, a disruption of cosmic order that demands correction.
This early economy gave rise to the interest-bearing loan and soon to compound interest, tools that made lenders powerful but risked destabilizing society. To prevent collapse, rulers periodically wiped debts clean in decrees known as amargi – or “return to mother.” These proclamations freed bondservants and restored lands, a tradition echoed centuries later in the Hebrew Bible’s Jubilee year. Such debt-erasing resets kept inequality from growing beyond repair.
By the seventh century BCE, coins arrived, making wealth a portable, standardized medium, fueling trade and expanding the pursuit of riches. Aristotle later reflected on these changes, framing money as a human invention that served society when used for exchange but degraded it when hoarded or multiplied through interest. Yet he also celebrated “magnificence,” the idea that wealthy, magnificent men should help society by funding grand public works.
As we’ll see in the sections ahead, magnificence blurred into self-justification, and the pursuit of wealth took on a moral gloss. Greed evolved from vice to ambition and eventually to virtue.
The biggest roadblock to this evolution arrived a little over 2,000 years ago. His message was so powerful that it became a religion.
Let’s set the scene in Jerusalem, 2,000 years ago. A wandering carpenter named Yeshua – passionate, radical, and utterly convinced of God’s law. Part of that law was that wealth was a barrier to God’s kingdom, and that he was in Jerusalem to erase the debts that were crushing the poor.
At the heart of Yeshua’s message was the Golden Rule: treat others as you would want to be treated yourself. That principle had echoed through ancient civilizations for millennia, but in Yeshua’s hands it became the cornerstone of his moral revolution. Would you want to lose your land, your livelihood, or be sold into slavery over a debt? No. God’s law demanded something better – compassion, equality, and the forgiveness of crushing debts.
Yeshua took this message to Jerusalem’s temple – the economic heart of Judea. He braided together a whip and stormed into the temple, driving out the merchants and lenders. He and his followers occupied the temple for days, teaching God’s law and most likely destroying debt records in the process. In that moment, Yeshua wasn’t just a preacher – he was a captivating, revolutionary king. But for the Roman authorities, he was a dangerous contagion that had to be stopped and made an example of.
After his death, the dream of debt jubilees faded. Yet early Christianity carried forward his deep mistrust of greed. Church fathers like St. Jerome and St. Aquinas condemned usury – the practice of making loans and creating debt – and medieval law capped interest rates.
But then came the Black Death, shattering Europe’s feudal order. In the wreckage, a hunger for new ideas, rebirth, and reconstruction bloomed. In Florence, a preacher named Antoninus reframed Aristotle’s concept of “magnificence” for the Christian elite: use your wealth for public works, and your money becomes virtuous. A new argument arose: maybe greed – or avarice – wasn’t just inevitable but essential. Without it, would there be cities? Art? Or any civilization at all?
This was a turning point. This defense of greed gave people a moral license to pursue profit, so long as they could frame their gains as benefiting society. Yeshua’s rebellion was slipping away, replaced by the belief that the pursuit of more is natural and good.
By 25, Cosimo de’ Medici was already a name whispered in Florence’s taverns and marketplaces. His father, Giovanni, had built the Medici Bank into a trusted institution with clients as lofty as the pope, but Cosimo wasn’t content to simply inherit. Over the next 40 years, he transformed the family’s modest business into a European financial powerhouse and effectively ruled Florence as an uncrowned king.
But what set Cosimo apart was how he used his wealth. He turned his private fortune into public magnificence. Inspired by Aristotle’s “Magnificent Man,” he funded libraries, churches, and grand works of art, binding his legacy to Florence’s very architecture.
But the influence of the Medici family didn’t stop there. In 1531, Giovanni di Lorenzo de’ Medici became Pope Leo X. And he brought his family’s taste for grandeur with him. Leo raised money aggressively, selling indulgences – absolution for sins – in some of the most brazen marketing campaigns the church had ever run. Johann Tetzel, the most notorious indulgence-seller, promised that coins in the coffer could spring souls from purgatory.
This open commodification of salvation provoked outrage. On October 31, 1517, Martin Luther condemned these indulgences as a mockery of true repentance. His challenge cracked the church’s unity, sparking the Protestant Reformation and dividing Europe.
Among the Reformers was John Calvin, whose theology reconfigured the relationship between money and morality. Calvin preached that all blessings, including wealth, came from God. So there was nothing wrong with amassing wealth, though he also believed that the rich had a divine duty to give generously.
The not-so-subtle difference in Calvinism was that he believed the haves and the have-nots were both examples of divine will. The fact that some people were blessed with money and others weren’t – again, it was all just part of God’s plan.
Calvinism also laid the intellectual foundation for what later became known as the Protestant Work Ethic. That ethic linked labor and making money directly to divine purpose. Work was a calling from God. Increasingly, money – the measure of productivity – was itself becoming a measure of piety, and diligence a form of worship.
When Constantinople fell to the Ottomans in 1453, it cut off European trade routes to Asia, forcing them to look for sea routes instead. This marked the dawn of the Age of Exploration, famously driven by “gold, God, and glory.” Wealth and religion had become so intertwined that if riches were seen as a sign of divine favor, then seizing them – by any means – was not only acceptable but righteous.
Columbus’s 1492 return from the Bahamas, filled with tales of gold, ignited a frenzy. Explorers like Hernando de Soto followed, combining military force with relentless extraction. In just a century after Columbus’s arrival, the population of the Americas plummeted from around 50 million to 8 million, driven largely by European diseases and exploitation.
Here, the idea of “beneficial greed” collapsed into pure, unrestrained greed. Any act in pursuit of profit became justified, and the labor shortage created by the decimation of Indigenous peoples led Europeans to import enslaved Africans. Slavery wasn’t new, but in the Americas it grew to an unprecedented scale and brutality, driven almost entirely by economics.
Over time, colonizers constructed elaborate moral and pseudo-scientific justifications for slavery. Africans’ relative immunity to disease was twisted into proof they were “born” for servitude. Clergymen cherry-picked scripture to defend bondage, while nineteenth-century US laws in many slave states declared that Blackness itself was evidence of enslavement. These arguments fused money, power, and religion into a single system where profit was further equated with God’s will.
This mindset sanctified centuries of plunder across three continents. Even after the Civil War ended legal slavery in the United States, the economic and ideological foundations of racial oppression endured. The racism embedded in American society today is the direct descendant of an era when greed wasn’t just unchecked but preached as holy doctrine.
By the eighteenth century, Europe’s money-driven order was showing its cracks. In the Americas, Native populations were being decimated, Africans were enslaved, and at home, inequality was stretching society to its limits. Could it be that greed – once sold as a civilizing force – was leaving deep, lasting damage?
In 1755, the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau claimed as much in his searing critique Discourse on Inequality. A Protestant Calvinist, Rousseau envisioned a society where leaders and citizens shared aligned interests, without fear of being cheated. But the world he saw was built on hoarding wealth, exploiting the masses, and elevating the few at everyone else’s expense.
In Rousseau’s view, it was money that shattered equality and had created a world where power justified theft and poverty justified taking. Inequality wasn’t nature’s design; it was humanity’s creation.
But two decades later, in 1776, Adam Smith provided industrialists with their counterpoint in The Wealth of Nations. Smith reframed commerce as a pragmatic, almost scientific system. He argued that the division of labor multiplied productivity and that “civilized” economies could offer even their poorest members more security than so-called “savage” societies. Yet he wasn’t naïve – he distrusted elites who manipulated laws for their own gain and saw organized religion as another oppressive force. Commerce, he believed, could break the church’s grip and create fairer opportunities.
And yet, one of Smith’s most famous ideas – the “invisible hand” – is also his most religious idea. In fact, it has become capitalism’s mantra, treated as an endorsement for pure self-interest: if everyone seeks their own gain, the invisible hand will sort things accordingly, and society will prosper. The invisible hand was clearly God’s hand, guiding wealth and poverty alike as divine will. And with it, Smith gave businessmen a new creed: commerce as god, profit as its highest virtue.
After the Revolution, America was broke and unstable. The central government had next to zero authority. There was no power to tax, no strong judiciary, and, most importantly for the wealthy creditor class, no real way to enforce debt collection. Most currency was worthless anyway.
This set the stage for the age-old showdown between creditors and debtors. A popular uprising in Massachusetts known as Shays's Rebellion was put to a violent end, but for the land-owning elite, this was a nightmare. These men hadn’t fought a revolution to lose control of their wealth to mobs of armed farmers. They needed a stronger system to protect their interests. The answer would be the US Constitution.
A century later, historian Charles Beard would blow up the romantic founding myth. He argued the Constitution wasn’t about liberty for all – it was about safeguarding property for the few. The new nation’s “godhead” wasn’t equality. It was money. James Madison is even quoted as saying that protecting wealth was the first order of government.
In general, economics was becoming less humane and more about number crunching. Britain’s Thomas Malthus did some math and concluded that since population grows exponentially and food supply grows linearly, that means famine, poverty, and death are inevitable. Not only that, helping the poor will only make things worse. This hot take fueled centuries of anti-welfare rhetoric and even justified eugenics.
Around the same time, getting a green light to be greedy got an unwitting boost from Charles Darwin. Darwin’s thoughts on evolution was its own bombshell, but it had a dangerous business-world distortion called Social Darwinism. If evolution naturally selects the fittest to survive, the titans of industry argued, then business “winners” were meant to win. It was Calvinism without God – Rockefeller and Vanderbilt could swap divine predestination for “natural law” and keep the same moral permission slip for ruthless behavior.
By the late nineteenth century, men like Carnegie, Vanderbilt, and Rockefeller – none of them born to royalty – were proof that this new creed could elevate anyone to staggering heights. Greed was something we could all believe in.
Meanwhile, in the mid-1800s, Europe was a hotbed of uprisings due to growing inequality. Bold new ideas were sprouting, and one of the loudest voices belonged to 30-year-old Karl Marx, a newspaper editor in Cologne, Germany.
In The Communist Manifesto, Marx described history as one long brawl between classes – the oppressors and the oppressed. Marx’s economic insight was sharp: capital wasn’t money, it was labor. Workers didn’t just produce goods – they produced capital itself. Without them, owners had nothing to invest, no machinery to run, no profits to hoard. The system demeaned the very source of its wealth.
But unlike in Europe or parts of Asia, Marxism never really seized political power in America. There were labor unions, but workers wanted a better deal – not a revolution. In the US, industrialists and laborers were often sitting in different pews in the same church of capitalism.
Speaking of capitalism, another German economist-sociologist, Max Weber, gave capitalism another layer of spiritual scaffolding. He acknowledged that science had replaced religion as society’s organizing principle, but it failed to answer the “why” of human life. The solution was capitalism, which framed hard work and wealth as signs of divine favor. In Weber’s telling, capitalism wasn’t just an economic system – it was a moral one, capable of filling the existential void.
Picking up where Weber left off was the writer Ayn Rand, who brings this six-century evolution to a close. Born in Russia in 1905, she fled the Bolsheviks and their disastrous attempts to abolish money. In her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, Rand strips capitalism of any lingering moral obligation to others. Selfishness isn’t just permissible – it’s the only virtue. Her philosophy of Objectivism rejects altruism outright. The individual is all that matters. The hero of her book, John Galt, is a capitalist messiah, presiding over a utopia where the cross has literally been replaced with a solid-gold dollar sign.
With Rand’s unabashed worship of greed, the transformation was complete. Money was now the organizing principle of society, finally mythologized as its own religion. Which is why, when Gordon Gekko declared in Oliver Stone’s 1987 movie Wall Street that “greed is good,” it landed like gospel.
Throughout history, people have stared at inequality and asked the same thing: Can’t we do better? The truth is, we can and we should. Aristotle knew 2,000 years ago that money is a human creation, and if it distorts society, we have both the right and the duty to change it.
That change begins with the oldest rule – the one that takes us full circle: treat others as you’d want to be treated. Centuries of glorifying greed have pulled us far from that simple principle. The belief that unrestrained greed benefits everyone has eroded our sense of mutual reliance. Ironically enough, the reminder is right there on the US dollar – e pluribus unum, “out of many, one.” Working together isn’t ideology; it’s common sense, the foundation of shared prosperity.
As for rebuilding the financial system, let’s start with interest rates. Predatory rates such as 25 to 35 percent on credit cards and 15 percent on student loans are legalized exploitation. For centuries, civilizations capped such rates; we should do the same. Jacob Coxey’s early twentieth-century vision of government-run banks lending at 2 percent could be revived with modern tools, including direct Federal Reserve accounts for all citizens. That would mean higher returns, lower fees, greater stability, and freedom from payday lenders.
Debt is the biggest stranglehold of all. The global debt is over $300 trillion. Much of it will never be repaid, and it’s crippling to vulnerable nations. A modern debt jubilee – paying creditors with newly created money, controlling inflation with temporary price caps, and resetting the system – could free both nations and individuals. It’s not unheard of. After the Second World War, forgiving Germany’s and Japan’s debts fueled their rise into global economic powers.
Money and debt are human inventions; they were never meant to be eternal chains. We can reinvent them to unburden the poorest, unlock growth, and foster cooperation. The power to act is in our hands – and always has been.
In this lesson to The Almightier by Paul Vigna, you’ve learned that there’s been a 5,000-year entanglement of money, power, religion, and morality. This trajectory shows how an invention meant to facilitate trade became a force that shapes and often distorts societies.
Starting at the temple economies of ancient Uruk, where debt carried moral weight and periodic jubilees reset the social balance, the story has evolved over centuries from the church forbidding usury to the beneficial greed of the Renaissance.
Doubts over the morality of creating wealth for wealth’s sake were overshadowed by influential works like Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Protestant ethics and quasi-religious ideas like the “invisible hand” helped reframe the pursuit of wealth as not just acceptable, but virtuous. By the modern era, greed had been stripped of moral restraints, embedded in capitalism, and justified as the engine of progress.
But it is in our power to change our relationship with money and reduce the inequality the current system has brought. Capping interest rates and resetting debt aren’t utopian dreams but proven tools for stability and growth.
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