A friend of mine uses the term “coin sickness“ to describe somebody who would rather have money than material wealth. Someone who sees the brand of clothing but couldn’t identify quality fabrics or stitching.
I think the point was that the poorly made luxury t-shirt has less intrinsic value than the well made generic t-shirt and the difference in the market values of the two is "coin sickness"?
The "money vs things" framing gets sharper if you split "things" into two buckets: consumption goods (the luxury t-shirt) and productive assets (land, tools, an income stream, a paid-off house).
What you are defending isn't money as an end, it is the optionality a functioning financial system gives you: time, mobility, ability to redirect capital quickly. That dominates a closet full of brand-name clothing for almost everyone.
But it collapses in two scenarios most readers haven't lived through:
1. Currency stress, where the optionality is denominated in a unit losing real value faster than wages adjust. Hyperinflations (Weimar, Zimbabwe, more recently Venezuela and Argentina) compressed the trade to weeks; people who held land, working businesses, hard commodities, foreign currency kept their wealth.
2. Counterparty failure, where deposits, money-market shares, and bond claims turn out to be promises from someone who defaults. 2008 was a near miss; the bank failures of the 1930s were the actual outcome.
Steady state: you are right. Tail state: the opposite. Most US household-finance advice assumes the steady state holds forever, which is a strong assumption.
Security and freedom, time, and well-being. Worth much more than another luxury t-shirt.