I would beg to differ. The monetary system might be described as something that is trying to abstract time and labour in the way you describe. But money itself is just a token of exchange.<p>The monetary system, is an attempt to use money, and market price setting to solve the problem you describe - and that problem is essentially NP complete, so what markets and market price setting, in conjunction with an enormous number of local decisions made in response to those price signals are doing is trying to find a reasonably efficient approximate solution.<p>It&#x27;s an untested assumption that the monetary system can actually do that without any regulation. There are good reasons to think that it can&#x27;t, especially over long periods.<p>Completely agree about the involvement in local politics - it&#x27;s easy to be an armchair economist, and ignore the reality that at the end of the day the single most important government function is that the garbage is collected regularly.