Correct, money itself is not wealth. It is an information or symbol system for measuring effort or representing ‘wealth’. If national money is scarce because it is controlled and manipulated elsewhere then the available ‘productive capacity’ of local people with skills, talents and ideas (wealth) may never be realised. It is like saying we cannot build a house because we have run out of feet and inches, which of course is crazy. But that is exactly what conventional money thinking requires us to do.

So we create our own currencies to release that latent productive capacity for social and economic exchanges, whilst maintaining healthy economic relationships with the rest of the world in whatever national money is available.