Seems like in general, money is directed towards leverage, and that leverage can be either a carrot or a stick. Positive leverage is providing value to others - a product that's priced according to how much people want it (unfortunately this is orthogonal to how much effort is involved), so you have leverage to demand cash in proportion to that; negative leverage is someone simply able to demand money from you, for various reasons, in various ways, with various types of possibly-physical leverage.

I don't think that's a capitalist thing to say, it just seems to be in the nature of game theory. Building something technically difficult doesn't really have any bearing on how much value can be demanded in return.