Money changed everything.
I don't mean that in the tired, cynical way people say it at dinner parties. I mean something stranger, something I've been sitting with for days now. In 1752, a Scottish philosopher named David Hume wrote an essay warning that government debt would tear apart the fabric of British society. He was worried about bonds. About stocks. About young aristocrats who didn't want to wait for their inheritance.
He was right. And his predictions read like a description of your Twitter feed.
Let me back up. I'm Gerd, and I run Free AstroScience from Tirana. Most days I'm thinking about black holes and exoplanets. But sometimes the universe of human ideas pulls me in just as hard as the cosmic one. This essay by Catherine Nichols in Aeon did exactly that.
The Question Nobody Can Answer Cleanly
Here's something that's always bothered me about politics. If the Left supports workers, why are Left-leaning regions often the richest? If the Right supports business owners, why do working-class conservatives keep voting for them? And if capitalism is one big system, why do the people inside it fight like they're living in two different worlds?
Marx gave us one answer: it's all about class. Owners versus workers. Bourgeoisie versus proletariat. Clean lines.
But the lines were never clean.
Nichols points out that the original Left-Right divide came from the French Revolution, where the Second Estate (landowners) sat on the right, and the Third Estate (everyone else) sat on the left . That "everyone else" included peasants, sure. But also merchants. Factory owners. Bankers. People who would later become very, very rich.
Marx tried to redraw the map. He put all owners—land and business—on one side, and all workers on the other. But voting patterns never matched his theory. They still don't.
So what's actually going on?
Enter Hume, Stage Left
David Hume was writing decades before the French Revolution. He never used the words "Left" or "Right." But according to Nichols, he described the forces that would create them .
His 1752 essay "Of Public Credit" was a warning about Britain's growing reliance on debt financing. The government was borrowing money from private citizens—selling bonds—to fund wars overseas. Wars for trade. Wars for empire. Wars that made stockholders rich.
Hume saw a problem. Actually, he saw several.
First, this new money was disconnected from tradition. For centuries, wealth in Britain meant land. You inherited it from your father. You passed it to your children. The land tied you to a place, to people, to responsibilities. You couldn't just take your estate and move to Paris.
But bonds? You could buy them with cash. You could sell them whenever you wanted. You could invest in France even if Britain was at war with France. The money was free. You were free.
That word—freedom—is where things get interesting.
The Addiction to Liberty
Hume noticed something that still echoes today. The rise of debt financing happened at the same time as the Enlightenment's obsession with liberty. Coincidence?
Nichols quotes the historian Richard Whatmore, who describes this as "an addiction to the idea of liberty among the populace and politicians" .
I had to sit with that phrase. An addiction. Not a discovery. Not an awakening. An addiction.
Here's why it makes sense. In the old landholder economy, your wealth came with strings attached. You owed things to people. Your tenants. Your family. Your king. Your freedom was limited by your obligations.
In the new stockholder economy, your wealth was liquid. Portable. Anonymous. You could live in any café in Europe, collecting interest payments from taxes paid by people you'd never meet. Your freedom was total—and someone else's power was gone.
Every increase in one person's liberty, Hume argued, meant a loss of another's power .
Three Groups Who Lost
Hume identified three groups who would suffer as the stockholder economy grew. Reading Nichols' description of them, I felt a chill. These aren't historical curiosities. These are the people who vote for the Right today.
Rural populations. The wealth of landholders had always been tied to the countryside. If your tenants thrived, you thrived. But stockholders could spend their money anywhere. Rural areas paid taxes that became interest payments flowing into London pockets. The countryside got nothing back.
Aging parents. In the old economy, the oldest generation held the wealth. They controlled their children. They controlled their grandchildren. But if young people could buy bonds and earn passive income, they didn't need to wait for inheritance. They didn't need to obey. The power shifted to the young.
People who wanted to control territory. Kings used to save money in war chests and spend it to defend or expand their borders. But now the government depended on the goodwill of stockholders. The king wasn't really in charge anymore. The money was.
Nichols writes that these three groups—rural people, aging parents, and those who want to annex land—still vote conservative today . The patterns Hume predicted in 1752 show up in electoral maps in 2024.
That's 270 years of consistency. Marx doesn't explain it. Hume does.
The Part About Inflation Nobody Talks About
Here's where I need to simplify something complicated. Bear with me.
Nichols introduces a factor that Hume couldn't have fully understood: inflation .
Starting around 1470, Europe experienced something unprecedented. The cost of living rose steadily for about 180 years. Historians call it the "price revolution." The cause was probably all the silver Spain brought over from the Americas. But whatever the cause, the effect was profound.
Inflation punishes certain behaviors and rewards others.
If you bury coins in your yard, they lose value every day. Bad strategy. But if you spend those coins on supplies, make goods, and sell them later at higher prices, you profit. Even better if you sell abroad. Inflation rewards production, trade, and investment. It punishes hoarding.
So all those changes we associate with early capitalism—the Protestant work ethic, the division of labor, the obsession with commerce—weren't just cultural shifts. They were adaptations to inflation. Ways of surviving in a world where money kept losing value.
And the financial system? Banks, loans, interest-bearing accounts? Those are inflation-fighting tools. We use them to keep our savings from shrinking.
Nichols puts it bluntly: "Without people financing their endeavors with debt, we would have no way of protecting our savings from inflation, on any scale—personal, commercial, or national" .
The system Hume feared wasn't just greed. It was survival.
Two Economies, Not One
This is the part that rewired my brain.
We talk about "capitalism" like it's one thing. One system. One set of rules. But Nichols argues that we're actually living in two overlapping economies .
The landholder economy. This is the old world. Inherited wealth. Family connections. Obligations that bind you to place and people. Traditional power structures where the old control the young.
The stockholder economy. This is the new world. Liquid wealth. Social mobility. Individual freedom. Power structures where the young can escape the old.
These two economies overlap. Sometimes they cooperate. Land near financial centers commands high rents. Taxes from industry fund farm subsidies. Inherited money grows even faster when invested in stocks.
But they also fight. They've been fighting since the 1780s, when governments in Britain, France, and America split into two parties—each representing one economy.
The Left represents the stockholder economy: finance, industry, international trade, liberty, social mobility.
The Right represents the landholder economy: inherited wealth, family obligations, cultural continuity, traditional authority.
This explains so much.
Why Working-Class Conservatives Aren't Stupid
I've heard smart people call conservative voters irrational. Voting against their interests. Duped by propaganda.
But Nichols offers a different reading .
Social mobility—the thing the Left champions—carries risks. Your children might move away. They might reject your religion. They might not care for you in old age. They might not give you grandchildren who share your values.
In the stockholder economy, even rich people can't make their adult children obey. Money doesn't buy cultural continuity.
In the landholder economy, even poor people can exert control over their families. Tradition, obligation, proximity—these are forms of power that don't require wealth.
So when working-class conservatives vote for candidates who oppose inheritance taxes, no-fault divorce, and social programs that enable young people to leave home—they're not voting against their interests. They're voting for a different kind of interest. One that values power over money.
That might be something more valuable to them than a tax break.
The Left's Secret Superpower
Here's the twist I didn't see coming.
Nichols argues that the Left isn't just a moral position about helping the needy. It's "a series of experiments in living under conditions of relentless inflation" .
Public education. Universal healthcare. Elder care. These aren't just compassionate policies. They're structures that enable social mobility—which creates the pool of borrowers that the financial system needs to function.
A financialized economy requires people who can take out loans and pay them back. People with education, opportunity, energy. People who aren't trapped by their birth circumstances.
So the Left's social programs don't just help individuals. They fuel the engine of modern finance.
This is how the Left can simultaneously be the party of Wall Street and the party that talks about overthrowing capitalism. It's not hypocrisy. It's two different relationships to the same system.
And it's why Left-leaning countries—Japan, South Korea, Scandinavia—adopted Leftist policies when they wanted to compete economically. They weren't being idealistic. They were being strategic.
What Climate Change Might Break
I want to end where Nichols ends, because it's the part that keeps me up at night.
For 270 years, the stockholder economy has been winning. Finance and industry have grown more powerful than land. Liberty has spread. Social mobility has increased. The Left has been on the right side of history—economically speaking.
But Nichols raises a terrifying possibility .
What if climate change flips the script?
Global warming is making habitable land scarcer. If land becomes more valuable than money—if controlling territory matters more than controlling markets—then the landholder economy might reassert itself.
Wars over land might replace wars over trade. Traditional power structures might seem more stable than financial ones. The Right might rise globally, not because people are stupid, but because the game has changed.
Nichols notes that Trump's talk of annexing Canada and Greenland sounds absurd to Americans. But we don't have to look far to see nations going to war for land . Russia. China. Israel. The pattern is already there.
And the first step to waging old-style territorial wars? Attacking the international web of economic interdependence. Tariffs. Restrictions on foreign aid. Pulling out of trade agreements.
Sound familiar?
What Hume Couldn't Have Known
I've been thinking about what Hume got wrong.
He thought the stockholder economy would destroy family ties completely. It didn't. People still inherit wealth. They still marry into it. They still rely on family connections for jobs and support. The old economy didn't disappear. It just got a competitor.
He thought the rise of liberty was purely destructive. But liberty also created space for experimentation. New social structures. New ways of living. Some of those experiments failed. Some of them gave us human rights.
He thought the conflict between landholders and stockholders would end with one side winning. It hasn't. The two economies keep fighting, keep overlapping, keep producing new political formations.
Maybe that's the real lesson. Not that one side will triumph, but that the tension is permanent. Built into the structure of modern life.
A Final Thought From Tirana
I write this from my wheelchair in Albania, a country that has lived through feudalism, communism, and wild capitalism in the span of a single century. We know something about economic upheaval here.
What strikes me about Nichols' essay is how it reframes the political fights I see every day. Not as battles between good and evil, or smart and stupid, or progress and reaction. But as conflicts between two legitimate ways of organizing life.
One way values freedom, mobility, innovation. The other values continuity, obligation, place.
Both have costs. Both have benefits. And neither is going away.
Hume saw this coming in 1752. Marx tried to simplify it in 1848. We're still living it in 2026.
The universe is vast and strange, full of black holes and dark matter and questions we can't answer. But sometimes the strangest thing is right here on Earth: the way a 270-year-old essay about government bonds can explain why your uncle votes the way he does.
That's the kind of science I live for.
Gerd Dani is the President of Free AstroScience, a science and cultural group based in Tirana, Albania. He writes about the cosmos and occasionally about the strange gravity of human ideas.
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