Money passes through time. So what. It is intrinsically connected with time because we ourselves operate in time. So what. We schedule all sorts of things according to time in addition to work hours. So what. The notion itself of a "work hour" is as much an abstract product of our minds as money, all the way down to our measurements of minutes and seconds and milliseconds. So what. We produce calendars of linear sequences and cycles which in themselves are not time, and which are not even us dividing time, or making sense of time, or categorizing time; rather, they are the representations of the projected stamp of our activities taking on the assumption of time as reflected in the rotation of the spheres. That's what the yearly calendar is: representing time within time. And this is perfectly natural, beautiful and not at all a fiction. Even Heaven itself respects it. It is vitally connected with the real. So what. When one says "money is time" or "time is money" one is not saying anything. But one is indeed compounding the fiction so desperately feared and consequently exacerbated by those trying to pop it. For just as we accrete a calendar as a human representation, of time as time receiving and being shaped by our respective activities going forward as a means of mirroring back to ourselves a stability to our activities (which because it has to do with real time is not at all fictional) so we accrete representation to wealth. So what.
All what any of this proves is that we were made for order and not chaos. Or more truthfully, that order was and is intrinsic in our creation, in our being made. And creation is hierarchical.
The difference between the two is this: whereas the formulation of a calendar is concerned with what is to come, being worked into our present, or our present going forward in anticipation of what is to come, after which we cast away our old calendars with their boxes all crossed off or our digital calendars are instantly replaced with the new one, and we say, "the best laid plans of mice and men", the formulation of money in its proper and most natural sense is concerned with what has already been completed, which then extends a stable proximity for the beginning of another activity going forward. The activities in the case of money are transactions.
Money only and ever comes into existence through a transaction of some kind. The way money circulates from party to party and from hand to hand is like to the way money comes into existence. The way money comes into existence can either be good or it can be evil. For the sound issuance of money, one can say it no simpler than this: the parties involved in a transaction must have completed the transaction both in terms of no one coming away from it deprived of what was agreed upon, but also nothing added on and extended from that transaction afterwards, which is projected onto the transaction beforehand. Which could generally be called speculation and derivatives, and for that matter, fractional reserve lending and government bonds (which are two sides of the same - ahem - coin). Nothing added on and nothing subtracted from: this is what constitutes the completion of a transaction - and thus the evidencing of wealth.
Money is not accreted to a commodity, or the production of a commodity, or the potential for the production of a commodity; rather, money is accreted to any number of future transactions as evidence of a prior transaction completed.
It is when we get away from this completion beforehand that we encounter economic woe. Derivatives, speculation, fractional reserve lending and government bonds (all of which are connected): these are at the heart of our economic problems.
In other words...usury. The making of money from money. But today it is specialized: usury is not today just a practice done by shady loan sharks. It lies at the very heart, or fountainhead if you will, of the issuance of money - the way money comes into existence. It has poisoned the well.
"Rapacious usury has increased the evil which, more than once condemned by the Church, is nevertheless, under a different form but in the same way, practiced by avaricious and grasping men." --Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum
And it is an argument about what constitutes the well that people are actually arguing about.
People are obsessed with the attempt to make money into something so full proof and so permanently real, so obsessed with making it de facto before it is de jure (when it is the other way around) that they are willing to render the priceless things of man into commodities in order to support this historically novel hysteria of theirs - this obnoxious hammering upon some absolute qualified conception of money, like it will part the Red Sea.
It never occurs to any of these people, these blind objectivists, that when they are talking about what money is - and then conceptualizing a healthy economy from the definition - that what they are actually talking about is governance. It would not occur to them in a thousand years.
Time-stamped:
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