There is another way to think about it, than originating in barter.
When societies were small groups, there wasn't much need for a medium of exchange, because they functioned as organisms. Everyone contributed what they could and would get a portion of what was available.
As they grew larger, accounting became necessary and that is what money really is, a contract, where the asset side is backed by the debt side.
The community would issue such tokens to those who contributed, such as clay tablets for grain in the communal granary. Those who didn't, better have someone liking them, like family.
Our problem, as these linear, goal oriented organisms in a cyclical, circular, feedback generated reality, is that while markets need money to circulate, people see it as signal to extract and store. The medium has become the message.
This requires ever more to be added and ever more metastatic methods of storing what has been extracted.
Econ 101 says money is both medium of exchange and store of value, yet one is dynamic, while the other is static. Blood is a medium, fat is a store. What if your body tried storing more blood than necessary?
It used to be that people would raise their children and be taken care of in old age. That's the organic exchange. Now the old have retirement accounts and the young have piles of debt. The bankers love it.
Consider that the capital markets could not function, without the government borrowing up trillions in essentially surplus investment money. That is the real elephant in the room. The secret sauce of capitalism is public debt backing private wealth.
The wars are a way to make it go away, so more can be borrowed. Has there ever been a time in history, where a country would have such a string of monumentally inept strategic failures and no one was held responsible and terminated? No. That's because the wars have nothing to do with actual national security.
The fact is, there isn't the investment potential for everyone to save individually, even if we turn the markets into glorified casinos. Yet we do save for many of the same reasons, so the public commons would be a logical solution.
The problem with this, is that any healthy society is based on collective responsibilities, with rights as reward, but when our country was first being imagined, the irresponsible were likely to starve, so the conversation has about allocation of rights. Now we have a society where rights are deemed to be universal, while responsibilities are extremely optional and the effect is the Tragedy of the Commons.
