Aristotle ranks "household management" (οἰκονομία) as higher than business or what he calls "wealth-getting" (i.e. the acquisition of money as a store of wealth and not merely a medium of exchange), and says the art of wealth-getting is a logical consequence of the invention of money as a natural means to facilitate trade for the benefit of multiple households. It's a logical consequence because what makes it useful as a medium of exchange also makes it easy to accumulate: Money is based on commodities that can be transported and marked easily, and just as easily stored away for future exchange. Yet at the same time he calls the logically consequential accumulation of this natural medium an unnatural innovation. How can something that is logically consequential also be unnatural?
If in Aristotle's teleology the household were supreme above all other social units, the answer would present itself, since a household only needs so much of the medium to meet its ends and anything beyond that can be called "unnatural". But in Aristotle's teleology of social organization the polis or the city is the highest form, due to its "self sufficiency." And, as he says, cities have great need of wealth. How can any city be self sufficient without trade, the natural consequence of which is accumulation of the means of exchange and thus of wealth? If the highest association, the city, requires wealth, why would Aristotle call it "unnatural" to accumulate wealth?
The critical distinction may be wealth accumulation for its own sake as a byproduct of pursuing the "good life", versus wealth for the mere purpose of achieving the "good life" by facilitating trade on a scale that would support multiple households. What is most naturally a means to an end unnaturally and as a consequence of human logic becomes the end. Citing the myth of Midas, Aristotle points out that a man sitting on a pile of gold will starve to death if he can't turn it into food. The notion of money for "the good life" and not for mere accumulation has come to be a platitude that we nod at but mistakenly ignore as impractical. One never knows how much money one will need in the future, and the art of accumulation promises not just the "good life" but the perpetually better life. The seeming limitlessness of imagination and appetite logically erases the otherwise natural distinction between our practical requirements today and our fantastic ideas about tomorrow. Without the distinction, it's suggested, there potentially won't even be a tomorrow. This points to the same problem on a higher order: If the appetite of a man will lead him to lose sight of this critical distinction between the practical and the ideal, what of the appetite of the city?
