It’s all about the money in this society any more.  Money has taken over from pretty much everything else that might have once been important.

I think this is born out in the ways money has come to represent various things in our society.

Money has always equated to power, and likely always will.  If you have it, you are powerful.  if you don’t, you aren’t.  It’s just that easy.  The money guys are the power guys.  This will likely never change.

Eventually, money came to represent quality as well.  Rich folks were considered the cream of the crop.  If you happened to be born poor, it didn’t matter how good a person you were, you were one of the unwashed masses, the “lesser” people, in the terminology of the day.  To refer to a “man of quality” meant a man with money, even if he was an arrogant bastard who ate children.

I suppose it was inevitable that at some point, money would also come to be equated with speech.  When the McCain/Feingold campaign finance reform law was passed, it put strict regulations on the amount of “hard” and “soft” money contributions a campaign could receive.  The supreme court struck down some of the restrictions as a violation of “free speech”.  Apparently, in addition to being better than me, more powerful than me, a rich person has more speech than I do.  Why does someone with money have more right to speak to his representatives than anyone else?  Why do they have more right to give to campaigns, more right to anything?  Have we really fallen so far that money is more important than people?