Its probably accurate to say most people think of money as the paper currency printed by governments.  And it is money in the sense that it functions as a medium of exchange, but is it sound, is it vulnerable to inflation?

To carry on and expand its many interventions, the state needs a currency that allows it to steal wealth without most people noticing.  This calls for an inflatable currency such as we've had domestically since 1933.  As former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan once wrote,

In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. There is no safe store of value. If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold.

There any many myths surrounding hard money currencies, and one of them is that money, both its nature and supply, is best left to the alleged guardian of our rights, the state.  The fact that money came into existence on the market and its ultimate form and supply were determined by economic law, is disregarded.  Money matters belong to the state, because the state, unlike the rest of us, is in a position to remove itself from market discipline.  Since the state is necessary to our survival, the story goes, it cannot do its job unless it can control the growth of money.  Money therefore must be of such a nature that its supply can grow in accordance with the orders of a state-appointed committee.

Even the classical gold standard was under control of the state.  When that control proved too limited for those eager for war, it was abandoned.  The gold standard did not fail.  States failed to keep the gold standard.

When Keynes unloaded his General Theory on the world in 1936 it was a manifesto of state economic law.  Free market economists would critique his work, but capitalism untethered scared the public.  After 1929 it became the devil in fine suits.  The fact that even top economists and industry leaders failed to see the Crash coming was especially unnerving.

Unaware of Austrian trade cycle theory, the public saw the market as an alluring evil, drawing people into its clutches with promises of riches then suddenly stripping them of their wealth.  Fear, then, and not ideological persuasion, led them to reject the market as it existed in the 1920s, and along with it any notion that the unhampered market was self-regulating.

Prior to U.S. entry into World War I, the government and its media allies worked hard trying to convince Americans that Germany was a threat to civilization itself.  No such effort was required to scare them about the Depression.  Unlike the Germans who were over there, the Depression was very painfully over here.