The advent of trade (business) and the trading class created a small but potentially powerful class whose income and wealth were not derived from direct contact with nature but came from trade, money changing, lending, insuring and other activities associated with the accumulation and investment of wealth in profit-yielding enterprises.  Only in a secondary sense did business depend on animal husbandry or agriculture.  As their primary task businessmen devoted themselves to the exploitation of labor power and the storage and merchandising of the products turned out by herdsmen, farmers, craftsmen.  Part of their profits went into more elaborate standards of feeding, clothing and housing themselves and their dependents.  Another, and a more crucial part of their profits went into ships, warehouses, and the implements used in converting raw materials into consumer goods and services, transporting them to the markets, displaying them and persuading consumers to diversify their needs, purchase a greater variety of goods and services and thus increase the number and profitability of business transactions.

As this process mushroomed with the expansion of civilization, consumers demanded a greater number of more expensive artifacts and consumer capital goods, from housing and house furnishings such as bathrooms and well-stocked kitchens to refrigerators, washing machines, air conditioners, telephones, television sets, bicycles, automobiles and elaborate recreation facilities and equipment.  The expansion of mass production and the mass market paced one another, constantly raising the ante.

Mass production, mass marketing and pyramiding profits resulted, first and foremost in the enrichment of businessmen.  Their riches automatically pushed them into a position of pre-eminent importance from which they were able to make public policy and utilize public authority for the protection and advancement of their own class interests.  It also called into being a vast array of new professionals; teachers, engineers, scientists, technicians, social workers and propagandists, converting the “middle class” from a shadowy remnant of feudal society into the largest class numerically and the most influential class politically in the entire modern community.

At the same time, economic enrichment and expansion increased the importance of the war-making apparatus.  The expansion of civilization has involved a competitive struggle carried on constantly along several fronts, economic, political, cultural, ideological.  The means of struggle in every civilization has included the military as a political force and as a final arbiter in deciding who should win and who should lose civil and inter-group wars.  Victory and defeat determined the fate of land and natural resources, populations, capital installations, taxing facilities, domestic policing.  This deterministic role of the war machine has never been more dramatically in the foreground than during the crucial years from 1910 to the present day, when war apparatus costs have topped the list of government expenditures.