Plenty of games, especially strategy and simulator games, have game mechanics related to politics or economics. From Recettear’s “Capitalism Ho!” to Hearts of Iron 4’s focus trees, political descriptions can be added to flavor game mechanics, and because different game devs have endless variation in personal worldviews, these additions can be absurdly bad at times. Even if the mechanic itself is good, it can have dunk-worthy labelling. Post the worst that you can think of, even if they come from an otherwise great game.
I’ll start: In Civilization VI, different government types you choose have different slots for policy cards, which let you select political policy bonuses for your civilization. In the modern age, two of the government types you can choose are “Democracy” and “Communism”. Already this is liberal drivel conflating Communism with non-democracy and “authoritarianism”. But the policy slots for these governments are even dumber, as Democracy gets more “diplomatic” and “economic” policies, and Communism gets more “millitary” policies. Famously, America and the west (clearly what Democracy is inspired by) never destabilized the world with arms manufactoring and invasions, I guess.
Plenty of those games have quests to do for gold, I figure just cut out the gold and have quests unlock more of the shop’s gear for you rather than pay for it. You could even just rename gold to influence points or something, that way the devs could still have the players spend an amount of things for an amount of something else.
The Rogue Trader CRPG was a little like this (for different reasons, obviously) - your wealth was immeasurable, but purchasing things involves your reputation with a faction and an abstraction of the degree of your wealth.
The ttrpg it was based on also had this mechanic. Only extreme material investments, like equipping a regiment with plasma guns, put a dent in your profit factor
I've toyed with this idea in my head for a while, and I think it has a lot of promise from a game design perspective. Like one problem players run into in Skyrim and others like it is that they wind up with piles and piles of gold that they don't know what to do with by the mid game - but if you linked staying at the inn, buying food and getting better gear to your reputation and tracked reputation separately in each of the game's holds, then you could really smooth out the progression and keep your "currency" relevant all the way to end game.
You could also track "peasant rep" and "nobility rep" separately, having your character be disrespected by the wealthy for most of the game and barring the ability to go to certain places behind getting enough nobility rep to be invited there. Once you start getting nobility rep, then you start getting quests for gold, and people start talking to you about investments, and you very quickly have more money than you know what to do with and can buy anything you want from peasants without thinking - but by that point in the game the lower classes don't have anything you need, so the currency that really matters is collecting reputation and favors from the rich to get rare goods and magic items and stuff.
It would be a pretty visceral way to create a feeling of "moving up in the world" for the player, and you could tie it into the narrative by having noble quests put you directly at odds with the people you were trying to help during the peasant quests. Imagine how powerful it would be if you come to a crossroad in the game, where it has dangled infinite wealth and access in front of you, and then after you learn to like the taste it forces you to choose between that and doing something heroic, giving a real cost to the choice to be a good person that almost every other game lacks.
It'd be more interesting than choosing between the racist blue team and the racist red team, at any rate.
I liked the way Ys VIII did it, there's no money to collect since you're stuck on a desert island, so to buy new stuff and upgrade it you just gather resources. There's a storyline reason for it, but something like that could be implemented in any other game to have a system that doesn't directly involve gathering money.