Currencies, like gold, have their limitations.

Once upon a time there was a king. His name was Midas. Midas loved gold more than anything. It was on his mind day and night. "More gold," he constantly obsessed. It was all he could think about. It was all he thought he needed.

Midas had a daughter, Marigold. He loved Marigold as only a father can loved a daughter. He lived in a beautiful castle. He ate wonderful foods and drank astonishing beverages. His clothes were only the finest! His gardens were magnificent. But, still, he craved more gold.

The gods answered his prayers. One day an angel appeared...

Well, this is not Paul Harvey. I am guessing you already know what happens. To refresh your memory, the angel empowered Midas to turn all he touched into gold. He woke up with alchemic powers and gleefully spent his morning turning everything he could touch into gold. This included his castle and its furnishings, his food, his drink, his clothes, his flowers...everything.

After awhile, Midas got hungry. But when he touched his food to eat. Presto! Gold.

"Wonderful!" thought he. Then he tried to smell it. Not much bouquet. Tried to taste it. Pretty dry. Tried to chew it. Oops! There went a tooth. Drink!? Same deal.

"This is a problem," thought Midas. But the worst was yet to come. In thoughtless despair, he hugged Marigold. She, too, turned into gold, a statue, not a daughter. Midas was beside himself with grief, wailing regret.

The angel returned. Midas begged him to reverse his thoughtless goldenizing.

Fortunately for Midas, he got the mulligan ... but it was mighty scary for awhile.

Silly Midas. Though he thought gold could meet his needs, he failed to grasp either gold or his needs.

Most of us learned the King Midas story as a cautionary tale of greed incarnate. I suggest a different slant. I suggest it as a fable of misplaced faith.

So here is us. This community. This country. This planet. It appears we think money is the answer. It is on our minds day and night. "More money," we obsess. Sometimes, it seems it is all we can think about.

We have sons and daughters we love as only parents can love. Most of us live in comfortable houses, eat wonderful foods and drink astonishing beverages. Our clothes are fine, clean and serviceable. We have magnificent gardens. All of this depends on money.

Then one day an angel appeared...

Hold on! There ain't no angels here. Heck, we don't need no stinkin' angels. We've been doing just fine trying to change everything into money all on our own.

Trouble was, Midas' belief in gold, his love of gold, had no reference to gold's inherent capacities and functions. Market value was irrelevant. Gold was structurally incapable of meeting Midas' needs.

What about us? Money is neither a good nor a service. It has zero nutritional value. It is not particularly pretty. It renders neither warmth nor love. It may give access to life's necessities but it is not, itself, among them. Face it, money is not even inherently useful; it is simply symbolic access or catalyst to the useful.

We are not talking wealth. This is not about a capacity to grow, thrive, distribute or share. Neither is it about knowledge, religious injunction or neighborliness. This is about money. At that, it is about a particular kind of money, namely the dominant trading currencies we call "dollars," "euros," "yen," etc. This is the money that is everywhere, "the water in which we swim."

Historically, money served three essential functions:

As a medium of exchange for goods and services.

As a storehouse of value.

As an accounting mechanism.

Functionally, this is it. Other issues spring from these.

Of course, we can have varieties of money designs, each with different motives, implications and characteristics. Midas' gold is one such. Frequent flier miles, grocery coupons and cigarettes in prison are yet others, among hundreds.

Here, we are concerned with our most familiar, namely those dominant, debt-based fiat-generated trading currencies. "Debt-based" means money created within the lending process, (each dollar in circulation is matched, literally, by a dollar of debt); "fiat," means it has value because someone says so; "trading currency" means its greatest utility engages global trade.

Midas discovered the disconnection between market value and meeting needs. You can't eat, drink or hug gold. Or dollars.

Although dollars have their declared trading values, this may not be relevant to social infrastructure. Indeed, this kind of money has traditionally presumed markets and powerful self-regulation-qualities absent within the cultural interior, the worlds of social services, health care, retirement, child care, education, safety nets and the like. Accordingly, I humbly suggest the possibility that these dominant trading currencies may be quite literally incapable of doing the jobs we are now asking them to do.

"What else!?" You ask with justified alarm.

"Not sure." I reply with trepidation. I can only observe that each day's headlines seem to bring news of more cracks within the financial foundations of our social infrastructure. These reinforce my abiding fear that our answers for these may not lie in dollars.

We laughed at the Soviet Union. Silly Russians. They believed they could distribute society's goods and services based on people's needs, that folks would give according to their capacities. Oops. Didn't work.

And so we determined to turn everything into dollars. And we did. Then we touched the educational systems and based them on dollars. Then we touched law enforcement and the legal systems. More dollars. Then we subordinated family structures to employment demands. More dollars. Then we touched medicine and health care, welfare and compassion systems of all sorts, retirement systems, housing, transportation systems, land use planning, natural resources across the board, equality levelers of all types, the arts, fashion, entertainment, sports, food and food distribution and-...I could go on...-in short, most aspects of modern life. More dollars.

Was our money ever meant for this? Perhaps we intuit the implications of this cultural arbitrage.

Like: How can we compare the life of a newborn child to a shopping mall?

Like: How can we stack more days, hours, minutes, seconds of apparent life for those dying, against inoculation programs?

Like: Why should "we" pay athletes so much more than teachers? Etc.

How can we so casually monetize workers' health or children's hugs or care for the aging or the value of clean water or justice for those on the blunt end of discrimination or protecting our society from the ravages of drugs or making sure that cigarettes kill fewer and few and also re fat and also re alcohol and also re gangs and also re forest fires and hurricanes and hail and and and...?

Whew! It is a big job being dollars. Maybe too big. Though we usually view these issues in terms of justice, it might be instructive to view them in terms of pure function.

Seriously. What if we are asking dollars to do chores it just does not do very well? More to the point: What if we are asking this form of money, this water in which we swim, to do jobs it cannot do for the long haul? Just like gold did not have the capacity to keep Midas fed, warmed and loved, could it be that our collective failures to understand dollars have served to create a most sandy foundation for enormous social constructs?

Could it be that we have been monetizing the ineffable, then wondering why the ineffable doesn't act like a market? Maybe the ineffable, being inexpressible and all, can simply not be monetized with the dominant, debt-based, fiat currencies?

Do I hear the faint resonance of Midas' wistful sighs as he grasped the inevitable implications of his morning's work?

Here's our deal. Throughout human history, dominant money systems served the three functions described above. They have essentially served no other. The social systems did those. Custom. Culture. Religion. Tribes. Family. Neighborliness. Or simple acceptance of life's vagaries. People die. Stuff happens. But can we put it all on money's back? Frankly, I suggest we consider the likelihood that we cannot-any more than Midas could solve his problems with more gold.

I do not argue for heartlessness, hard-heartedness or anarchy. Nor do I suggest these are not real issues. Yet, we must also observe a simple fact: Never, in the history of humankind, have dominant trading currencies been asked to do the jobs we

are asking them to do in this 21st century.

Yet here we are demanding that the same money that serves to transact global business, money that changes both hands and valuations with spectacular volatility in inconceivable volumes, also serve as the public program foundation for feeding the hungry, healing the mentally and physically sick, generating justice, homing the homeless, clothing the naked, assisting the elderly, supporting the unproductive, parenting children or otherwise serving to buffer your folks and mine, (then us), from ill fortune's ravages and time's depredations. We can wish to be caring, compassionate and supportive; it just seems hard to do that within a medium of commercial exchange.

It helps to remember that none of this is foreordained. In fact these public systems are relatively immature, at best less than 115 years old (Germany's social security system). In the meantime, we can easily observe the failures of humanity's most aggressive social experiments. Dollars don't seem to do well off-market.

Perhaps it is also helpful to remember that money is about agreements. As Bernard Lietaer, father of the euro, observes, the statement that "There is not enough money for us to..." is the functional equivalent of an architect's complaint that there are insufficient inches to build a home.

Every day, commercial markets determine what works. In the process, they determine what "inches" are for trading purposes. Not so when we use trading currencies within the social/compassion systems. Here consequences are evaluated in decades, then subjected to analytic anarchy, outright error and overt manipulation. There are no natural, efficient correction mechanisms. "It's not fair," is no substitute for objectivity-just grounds for argument.

The argument that we cannot afford social programs is a nonsequitur. Money is a remarkable force. Its very nature bespeaks cooperation and community. We have the inches, but they might be more effective if our agreements re money could be more useful, better designed and more sensitive to the jobs at hand that are necessary for achieving admirable goals.

This might mean reconsidering cultural institutions or constructing new ones. It might mean revising cultural expectations, including miscellaneous cultural sacred cows. The alternatives could be various forms of systemic collapse.

Or they might mean complementary currencies designed to do certain jobs. For example, Japan has experimented with over 300 different versions of "firieu kippu"-currencies designed to attract individuals to provide services to the elderly. Certain communities throughout the world are using "time-dollars" and district currencies to augment cooperative spirit and mutual engagement. In others, specific local currencies encourage local markets and businesses. Still others, using frequent flier miles as examples, promote full utilization of fixed-cost facilities.

Complements could include imaginative uses of existing resources. For true money inspiration, look up Curitaba, Brazil and learn how bus tokens brought flowers to the desert. Demurrage systems emphasize exchange volatility.

The vast worlds of complementary currencies provide genuine alternatives to Midas' dilemma by encouraging human beings to meet human needs through creative uses of money tools. Dollars do not translate these intentions very well, but other money forms are apparently able to do this just fine.

I am not naive. Existing systems are embedded, even if they are relatively new from an historic perspective. However, the dollar's shortcomings are no joke. Whatever might evolve requires honestly grasping strengths, weaknesses and attributes of our dominant trading currencies.

Though Midas could not turn gold into nourishment, it is, nonetheless, food for thought.

Richard B. Wagner, JD, CFP, is the principal of WorthLiving LLC, based in Denver.