[gohrt]

Money, or more properly, _currency_, is not a store of value. Oil, timber, or woool is a store of value -- it is actually something you can use. Money is an abstract "IOU", a right to demand someone give you something of value. At the end of the day, a society with oil, timber and wool is better than a society with only money. The only utility money has is that it facilitates production, instead of leaving people unemployed and starving because they have no convenient way to trade their labor or capital for whatever they need.

[anigbrowl]

Yes...that's why I described money as 'an abstraction.' My point is that the underlying resources on which money gives you an easy means of purchasing a claim (instead of having to barter) are sometimes perishable, which means that opting to store rather than use them can have a cost (separate of the opportunity cost of foregone alternatives) and inflation could be thought of as the incorporation of the aggregate perishability of goods into the abstraction of currency. I can't give you a citation for this, it's just my personal conjecture.