"The moment that barter is replaced by indirect exchange mediated by money, ready intelligibility ceases and abstract interpersonal processes begin that far transcend even the most enlightened individual perception.
"Money, the very 'coin' of ordinary interaction, is hence of all things the least understood and - perhaps with sex - the object of greatest unreasoning fantasy; and like sex if simultaneously fascinates, puzzles, and repels. The literature treating it is probably greater than that devoted to any other single subject; and browsing through it inclines one to sympathise with the writer who long ago declared that no other subject, not even love, has driven more men to madness. 'The love of money,' the Bible declares, 'is the root of all evil' (1 Timothy, 6:10). But ambivalence about it is perhaps more common; money appears as at once the most powerful instrument of freedom and the most sinister tool of oppression. This most widely-accepted medium of exchange conjures up all the unease that people feel towards a process they cannot understand, that they both love and hate, and some of whose effects they desire passionately while detesting others that are inseparable from the first."
-F. A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit
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