Money has mobility. It knows no geographic loyalty and thus has a centrifugal force on family, neighborhood, community, and increasingly, our entire national identity. Money and pricing devalue what is not counted in dollars or yen - air and water, and basic tasks such as caring, neighborliness, citizen involvement, rearing children, and learning. Compare surgeons' incomes to those of primary care doctors. We pay heavily for that illusion of certainty when we bail out the savings and loan industry, the banks that created the Third World debt crisis, and the budget deficit.
Money is backed by law.
Monetary exchanges create rights and obligations that the courts, at least in theory, will enforce. Time Dollars are backed by a moral obligation, a norm of reciprocity. With this currency, deeds, good and bad, leave footprints, and that has a powerful effect in creating community. The computer functions as a kind of collective neighborhood memory that says what goes around comes around. The real price we pay for money, the real cost, is the hold that money has on our sense of what is possible - the prison it builds for our imagination.