The mind keeps returning to the beginning of charging admission in the early modern English travelling theatre. Something happened there, perhaps, when the (already divided) Reformation met the empiricism prevailing on that island, especially in the colder and cloudy northern bits.
There is an epistemological argument for the apotheosis of the currency, and it traces to the beginning of the last century. Basically it runs something like this -- we are inculturated with old habits of mind that have become unproductive, and led to things like war, papistry, etc., and the best way to live is to do what works, and the gaining of the dollar is therefore the objective indication that you're doing the right thing. A very darksome view would see this at the root of much of the know-nothingism, the explicit anti-Catholicism prevailing at the land grant universities of the 19th c., etc. A kingdom of moral ends, that first light of the enlightenment, actually confounds this worship of wealth, so having a moral center is made identical with conceptual and ethical notions about the physical body.
And this epistemological sense is at the root of the actual glee that some have when seeing others without money. Avarice has its reasons. It's just that they're not very good ones.
There's no easy answer. These truth-seekers and fellow travellers who have been fighting each other, over the last couple of centuries especially, have distilled various necessary elements of larger truths within their fenced-off private domains, and you do have to try to understand everything in order to get anywhere.
No simple highway.