I can understand and appreciate your concerns. They aren't trivial, and I am honest when I say I appreciate the thought you are giving this. I would just say this: money is not *necessarily* an idol. I see it as a technology like any another, except that it doesn't manipulate gross matter. Instead it is a time technology. The danger of money is precisely that it does, to an extent, liberate man from the natural vegetative cycle of nature. But can't we agree that (although not in all ways), in many ways this liberation has increased the good in society? Are we better today in terms of technology and wellbeing for not all having to be farmers? There is a reactionary sort of ethos that says we *aren't better*, and at times I have been prone to this, but if you let your emotions settle and really approach the question clearly, I think it is obvious that we are better today for not all needing to be farmers. I agree with you on the risk of money. *It can be an idol* - especially without God in the picture. If we look at religion, it actually gives us the laws by which we prevent money from becoming an idol. It encourages charity, tithing, It would prevent usury, and generally prevent the just order from overtaxing and also violating natural property rights. I think you want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but I want to point out that we have advanced the conversation to an argument among economic systems. I would never say that discovering the best economic system is an easy task. It's taken some of the best minds in history to task. But the presence of corruption (the many varieties that you point out) does not poison the concept of a money economy whatsoever, rather, it shows that man can corrupt anything, making the issue of a moral and religious system paramount - and not separate from the economy, but as an overlay of the political-economic system. Keeping any institution just requires this very same moral order. In fact, it is the rugged individualism you promote that has done more to corrupt this economy than anything. Why? Because it was this self-interest that made people vulnerable, as isolated individuals, to the offers of the Jews, which always relies on a peron's *passions*. Runaway capitalistic consumerism is a problem in a society of individuals overcome by the pleasure principle and their own self-interest. But we could begin to look at what makes one system better than another. One of the downfalls of our system is the private centralization of control of the money supply - which does what? Puts the control of money in *individual* interests instead of tethering it to a government (which is ideally offset by the Church). We could also confront the issue of fiat, and begin to talk about the improvements with, say, labor-backed currency. There was a point, in fact, that the church had built up a surplus of wealth based on such a system and without usury. The issue is NOT money...it is allowing the fact that money is an abstraction to take it out of the natural law. Usury is reproduction without copulation, and homosexuality is copulation without reproduction - as EMJ is fond of saying (and which I believe originated with Aristotle?). You can control the function of money in society by (a) preventing usurious growth and exchange, (b) exploitative speculation and information control, and (c) by backing the very value of the currency on something *real* such as labor. In the end, the same moral commandments that always preside over us, also preside over our use of monies. The individuals in an economy must participate mutually in a game founded on the same value system and on *healthy* fear of the same transcendent authority: God. God must be the idol, the one and only (never mind my strained use of that term). It's precisely when God ceases to be the zenith of man's ideals, the image to which he constantly aspires, that man's self-interest and his passions usurp his faculties. A key revelation is that we *all have either masterS or a master.* There is no escaping this. Submit to The One master, or become the subject of the many, which together in their mutual self-exaltatuon will tear a man's identity into warring parts. @PS @ARM