Acquisition of lots of money is not the same as moving money around, which was your original point. Acquisition of lots of money is also a proxy for impact — i

Acquisition of lots of money is not the same as moving money around, which was your original point. Acquisition of lots of money is also a proxy for impact — if you provide just $3 of value to every American, ONE TIME, congrats, you're a billionaire. Hell, there are 7.8 billion people in the world. If you can get 1% of them to pay you a penny once a year, you're making $780k/year. Most smart people spend a lot of time thinking about building empires. Making money is just a really nice side effect of building the empires. In this world, there are 2 endeavors that make a LOT of money: empire building and macro resource allocation. The majority of the best and brightest will spend a lot of time thinking about those two endeavors no matter what the underlying system is. In a parallel universe where all resource allocation and production is driven by the government — your elite class will simply be in the officer ranks of those bureaucracies. It's no different from the military where the elite West Point graduates enjoy greater status than the enlisted rank-and-file.