If money ever starts looking particularly illusory, try thinking in terms of the underlying resources that markets allocate.
That's 'resources' viewed as expansively as possible, everything from the specialized labor-hours of people who know how to do quality control on bulk-manufactured photovoltaics to the ore used to make ball bearings in the factory all the way to the guy in charge of managing a grain elevator that was involved in making the bread for the sandwich one of the janitors had for lunch. The web of collaboration between all these far-flung people who mostly don't know each other, too vast and intricate to fit in any living mind, is how we currently get most of our material stuff.
... And in a conventional market system, the core of how those people coordinate their efforts is money. The price that each person is willing to buy something for or sell it for sends a signal about how much they care about it relative to other things. And markets are one popular way of aggregating that information, helping guide society's cooperative efforts in the direction of what people care about.
There are various allocation systems that don't involve money, both theoretical and historical. Community-based mutual reciprocity with a reputation mechanism to discourage freeloading, for example, can be found all over the place in pre-modern history because it worked – as long as your community was small enough that you can realistically all know each other. Or, back in the 20th century, there were a number of efforts to scale up operations research toward the level of nations, since suddenly we had computers fast enough to handle e.g. non-trivial linear programming. (The successes and failures were both instructive.)
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Coordination problems are hugely underrated in political discourse. So when I hear people say things like "The economic system is the ideology holding us back", I always have to wonder: how carefully has this person thought about a what a viable alternative would look like?
"I dislike the current system" is only the first and most trivial part of a real reform agenda; the next part has to be "... and here is how to meaningfully change it in a way that doesn't result in disaster, with a detailed discussion of mechanism design and a look at relevant historical prior attempts. [Insert essay or hyperlink here.]"
Sadly a lot of people look at our economic system through an ideological lens - how it allocates resources is, to them, driven by political, cultural and social motivations. The fact that by far its most important purpose is resource allocation is often completely ignored.
Rising petrol prices here in Australia draw criticism against fossil fuel wholesalers - as if they are doing this solely to screw over Australians. The fact that these high prices are caused by an actual lack of resources and that the higher prices are driving a reallocation of resources to those who need them most (ie. most willing to pay for them) is not on the radar for many.
> The fact that these high prices are caused by an actual lack of resources and that the higher prices are driving a reallocation of resources to those who need them most (ie. most willing to pay for them) is not on the radar for many
Careful using words like "need". The resources are allocated to the economically most efficient sectors. Since if you are economically efficient, your profits are higher and can afford to pay more than others.
In most cases these are congruent ideas, though. If I have no choice but to drive, but someone can drive or take public transport or work from home, high fuel prices incentivise them to not use it, saving some for myself.
I'm sure there are plenty of people throughout an economy who just don't care, but on average it has substantial impacts, and it's common now for people to totally dismiss that.
"It’s not only our reality which enslaves us. The tragedy of our predicament when we are within ideology is that when we think that we escape it into our dreams, at that point we are within ideology." - Slavoj Zizek
> The fact that these high prices are caused by an actual lack of resources and that the higher prices are driving a reallocation of resources to those who need them most (ie. most willing to pay for them) is not on the radar for many.
This, for example, is a deeply ideological statement. Do I really need something most just cause I can pay more for it? Does the billionaire need the mansion more than the homeless person needs some living space?
The other replying commenter made a good point that "need" is perhaps not the best description, but I'll stand by it as reasonably close to what I mean.
Yes, there are plenty of people with high incomes who continue commanding resources they may not strictly "need", but across the economy as a whole the effects of these prices is still to allocate resources in an efficient way. The point is this avoids an acute shortage and rationing, which is the alternative to transmitting this information via prices and almost certainly far less economically productive.
Gold coins? Pesos? Cows? Inferior-quality copper ingots?
It's entirely possible that you have a good point, but if so, it's gonna need a whole hell of a lot more context to elucidate.