I can name you lots and lots of broke poets and writers from the last thousand or so years, but I can only name you a handful of wealthy people that died more than 100 years ago: Rockefeller, Carnegie, maybe the first Rotschilds (which one, though?), Jakob Fugger and the Medicis.
I generally agree with you, but I think a counterpoint is that the dynamic which currently obtains, where the merchant class is on equal footing with the political class in terms of power and influence, is a relatively new phenomena. For most of history, people simply farmed the land and the only notables were the (relatively small) political class that wielded power, mostly at the tip of a sword.
