money is power

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

a maxim asserting that wealth confers not merely material comfort but political influence, social authority, and the capacity to shape the conditions of other people's lives; the equation of money and power is among the oldest and most persistent observations of political economy, from Aristotle's analysis of oligarchy through Machiavelli's advice to princes through Marx's analysis of capital as crystallised social power; in modern democratic politics the relationship between money and power is contested and regulated — through campaign finance laws, lobbying disclosure requirements, and anti-corruption measures — but rarely denied; the phrase serves as a descriptive observation about political reality, a warning to the politically naive, and a critical indictment of systems in which economic inequality translates directly into political inequality