Paradoxically, money creates a deep sense of powerlessness as well, since technically we are not able to provide money for ourselves; someone or something else must do that for us -- our employers or, until recently, our stocks. All that, money can do; and when such essential, familiar functions are snatched from one's life, small wonder that people may grow wild, frantic, even (as in the shooting in a stockbrokers' office in Miami last week) murderous.
What money can do, however, is not the same as what money is. Return for a moment to the theory: people value money because they value one another. In other words, the usefulness of money is directly related to and established by continuous mutual need. People work for money to buy things that other people make or do, things that they cannot or will not make or do for themselves but that they deem necessary for some definition of self-improvement. The mere existence of other people creates a market for goods; a market for goods, a potential source of human betterment.
