Power is things like: can lock someone in a box due to them not giving a percentage of their income; can send someone to die in another country; can stop someone building somewhere; can demand someone's money as a penalty for an infraction of a rule you wrote.

You don't need money for those things.

Money (in a market) can buy you things, but only things people are willing to sell. You don't exert power; you exchange value.

Money can and does do all of those things. Through regulatory capture, rent seeking, even just good old hiring goons.

The government itself uses money to do those things. Police don't work for free, prisons aren't built for free, guns aren't free. The government can be thought of as having unfathomable amounts of money. The assets of a country includes the entire country (less anyone with enough money to defend it).

If a sword is kinetic energy, money is potential energy. It is a battery that only needs to be connected to the right place to be devastating. And money can buy you someone who knows the right place.

Governments have power because they have resources (money) not the other way around.

> Through regulatory capture, rent seeking, even just good old hiring goons.

Regulatory capture is using the state's power. The state is the one with the power. Rent seeking is the same. Hiring goons is illegal. If you're willing to include illegal things then all bets are off. But from your list of non-illegal things, 100% of them are the state using its power to wrong ends.

> The government itself uses money to do those things. Police don't work for free, prisons aren't built for free, guns aren't free.

Yes, but the point about power is the state has the right to lock you up. How it pays the guards is immaterial; they could be paid with potatoes and it'd still have the right. They could just be paid in "we won't lock you up if you lock them up". However, if Bill Gates wants to publicly set up a prison in the USA and lock people in it, he will go to jail. His money doesn't buy that power.

So, no. The state doesn't have power because it has enough money to pay for a prison and someone to throw you in it. People with money can't do what the state does.

The state is not a source of power, it is a holder of it. Plenty of governments have fallen because they ran out of resources, and any governments that run out of resources will die. The U.S. government has much, much more money than Bill Gates, but i am sure he could find a way to run a small prison, and escape jail time if needed.

The state only has the right to do something because it says it does. It can only say it does because it can enforce it in it's terrority. It can only enforce in its territory because it has people who will do said enforcement (or robots hypothetically). The people will only enforce because the government sacrifices some of its resources to them (or sacrifices resources to build bots). Even slaves need food, and people treated well enough to control them. Power doesn't exist with resources, the very measure of a state is the amount of resources it controls.

Money is for resources.

I am not arguing that anyone currently has the resources of a nation-state, it's hard to do when a state can pool a few thousand square miles of peoples money to it. I am arguing it money that makes a state powerful.