Men prepare a meal for enjoyment, and wine makes life merry, and money is the answer to everything.
-Ecclesiastes 10:19

It's a miracle, by golly, this stuff we call money. With it, you can do just about anything. You can travel the world or live and dine in the most opulent places and in the most extraordinary environments. Somebody somewhere will do just about anything for you. You can enjoy the greatest luxuries, access amazing intellects or buy astonishing art. If you are inclined to share or bequeath, you can feed the poor, cure the sick, solve elusive mysteries or endow great universities. Or, if you're more self-centered, you can enjoy an array of personal indulgences. You can get great drugs with impunity, amass extraordinary collections, travel in style, get the best medical care, bribe the influential or pamper yourself in any number of ways. It provides us with security, fun and stimulation. Is money amazing or what?

What?

Actually, there is plenty wrong with it. It is, at best, imperfect, especially in our personal and collective failures to understand it. Not only do we fail to understand it fully, we are not remotely aware of ourselves in relationship to it-and that seems fraught with implications, especially in these financially perilous times. Accordingly, I suggest we'd best be about the business of understanding it.

Before proceeding, let me make it clear. I am a big fan of money. I believe it is extraordinary, a key to civilization and a powerful alternative to violence and coercion. At its best, money makes it possible for human beings to share our finest qualities with each other, peacefully. And let's consider it on an even loftier plane: More acts of peace, love, sharing and genuine brotherhood occur daily within money's embrace than through any other man-made artifact. Indeed, money is arguably humanity's greatest innovation. So maybe it is important and merits our appreciation. Maybe. But again, not quite-at least, not without some exploration, conversation and fresh thought.

To begin with, we know that money is sufficiently challenging that it is the second-most-addressed topic in the Bible. So for at least a couple of thousand years, it has occupied a central place in humanity's thinking about life, ethics, purpose, priorities and balance.

We also know that money is at the heart of astonishing pain, both in its abundance and its scarcity. The notion that money does not provide happiness is confirmed in study after study. We can see right now the social ripples when we treat money badly. Money tempts. It can poison relationships, rip families and communities asunder and bring good people to sin and perdition.

So what is wrong with it?

It is not just the economics, although that's trouble enough, particularly when its "scientists" do not respond to challenges facing their underlying axioms. Nor are its problems illuminated by the 20th century capitalist/communist/socialist dialectic-although this nonsense continues to plague public conversations, interfering with rational thought of all kinds. No, it is money itself. Money has an array of characteristics and quirks that render it unpredictable, mysterious and unreliable. Ideally, we would understand these and learn to work with them or around them. Unfortunately, money itself is not so accommodating. We cannot avoid it, yet it can wash through society like uncontrolled floodwaters-with similarly unpredictable results.

Money can lead to both personal self-destruction and to the manipulation of entire systems. Moreover, it is subject to force. The guys with guns can take it away from rightful owners and law abiders. Hackers with keyboards can be even more effective at this than robbers carrying heat.

Throughout history, money has been mostly about trade and military conquest. Only recently has it been used as a tool of big government and social services. Not surprisingly, it does great with international trade where goods can be accurately compared and worths accurately estimated. It does not do so well with hard-to-value social functions such as education or health care where service providers cannot be objectively judged.

Teachers complain constantly about being "underpaid," becoming particularly embittered at what they perceive to be outrageous compensation paid to athletes and entertainers. However, the problem seems to rest largely in the fact that no one knows the value of an individual's education or those teaching. Objectivity eludes. We know that wealthy societies are generally well-educated ones, but who should get the credit and when? The athlete or the entertainer, meanwhile, is measured every day through ticket sales and changing franchise values without having achieved tenure. Is this fair? Money doesn't care about fair.

Of course there are other factors at work. Money has also reflected cultural male dominance where hunting and military prowess have generated power. Birthing, child care, health care, nursing, elder care, education, social work and the like have been functions traditionally performed by women. These functions are hard to monetize. They tend to present valuation difficulties, and they tend to pay less than more easily measured occupations.

We also pay for scarcity more than utility. Albert Einstein once observed, "Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." Money is the embodiment of this sentiment. Indeed, the sinews of family and community are for the most part formed without money, yet they are vital to a functional civilization. Similarly, such life essentials as air and water have been notoriously undervalued.

Money is unpredictable and unreliable. It is subject to periodic crashes, panics and manipulations in diverse market sectors. And these are not necessarily accidental per se. It seems instead that they are the natural result of systems that often reward those individuals who take on extra risk, yet trust the public to bail them out when the going gets tough. While economic systems like predictability, people like to take risks and reap rewards. The cycle leads to private gains and public pain, as demonstrated by our current crises.

Unfortunately, money taps human eccentricities. I once heard Jacob Needleman observe, "Everybody is weird about money." There are no exceptions, not among bankers, lawyers, politicians, consumers, financial planners, spouses or chairmen of the Federal Reserve. In other words, the very people we trust to be sensible around money are also weird about it. Remember, even Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke and Barack Obama were once lads, with mothers, communities and thousands of years of tradition behind them. Why would they be better with it than everyone else?

Money requires special expertise and esoteric knowledge. Ideally, it would be machine-like in its operations. It would grow predictably and mechanically. In an ideal world, we could look five years down the road and trust that it would function with some certainty, just like crops, fishing waters or extractable natural resources. This would be of great help to everyone from public officials to individuals trying to plan for their lives. We could even prepare for bad years. Unfortunately, we know it doesn't work like that.

As we try to plan for our needs 20 to 40 years hence, we know we will encounter different economies with different employment situations. We won't know what that will mean. For the most part, the economies are out of our control. Yet we are asked to plan for our circumstances decades beforehand at the same time we are asked to understand complex financial products in the present. We're also asked to appreciate all the various individual risks we face, such as theft, incompetence, natural catastrophe, personal injury, legal trouble or simple moments of extraordinary stupidity. One thing is sure: Money is tough. It cannot be trusted to provide long-term security.

Although money is based on scarcity, fungibility and definable value, it is not inherently fair. That seems to be a problem for some folks. Neither does money care about unintended consequences, including metaphorical elbows to the nose or knees to the groin. As do natural forces, money forces blow through people's lives and communities not caring who gets hurt. Witness Detroit. Is it the workers' fault they trusted the engineers and marketers to get it right?

Perhaps money's most unfair aspect is that it requires scarcity in order to be effective. If there was enough money for everyone, no one would want it. Pricing would be impossible. The system would collapse. Yet it seems inherently unfair for some to have plenty and others not enough. Oh well.

When people play by the rules, money can work effectively. Obviously, there are those tempted to operate outside of the rules. Robbers, fighters and cheaters can attempt to gain economic advantage without providing commensurate economic value. These folks can wreak havoc on their societies and the money doesn't care.

Because money is essentially clean, we tend to underestimate its capacity for inflicting damage on innocent persons. Financial violence is viewed differently from physical violence, even though the consequences may be even more horrific. Lately we've been treated to scenes of fraud and manipulation. Their perpetrators don't look like bad people; their suits fit, their hair is nicely trimmed and they look as if they have showered recently. Yet they don't come any dirtier. What's worse, they came close to bringing the economic system to its knees. How much worse could they be? They have hurt millions.

Money distorts. Throw enough of it somewhere and almost anything can happen. The qualities that make it so handy for international trade are pure liabilities when it comes to funding terrorism, prompting bribery or destroying local businesses.

Sometimes, people only feel comfortable with money if they can insure it. But how much should that cost and how much can you risk? These questions were as relevant for merchants of the 15th century, as they sought protection against pirates, as it is today, when people want to insure against the calamities of Mother Nature, which, like the pirates, doesn't care what your money is worth to you.

But insurance only works if there is actually money to pay for those calamities. It's easy for an insurance company to cash its premium checks, but there's a problem if those insurers do not ask for enough, do not keep enough or otherwise lack integrity. Even as we speak, a little company known as AIG is unable to fund commitments it made to insure certain financial instruments. Throw the government into the mix, acting as fairy godmother to retrieve what people have lost, and we can get a real mess on our hands. (Fortunately for AIG, at least their bonus checks cashed.)

This is the corollary of a more important problem: Money often rewards people for deferring until later what they ought to be doing now-perhaps building up levees for hurricanes, filling potholes or investing in green energy projects. Instead, the wisdom is: "Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die."

This takes us to a whole different issue-the one where spending is a lot more fun than saving. There are people who just can't keep a nickel in their jeans, come what may. Yet not all of them have the courtesy to die before their money runs out. Indeed, many have the audacity to live into old age without the means to pay for it. What does society owe those who fail to understand money's demands for a lifetime of stewardship?

Worse, we generally act as though money is singularly personal. In fact, the term "my money" is an oxymoron. Scrooge McDuck may amuse us with his money-filled swimming pool, but it would be a pointless use of the stuff in real life. Francis Bacon is credited with the observation that "Money is like muck, not good except it be spread." Money doesn't have value if we keep it in stacks. It has value only in our relationships with others.

Nonetheless, we may be asking too much of it. In 21st century America, all of our social systems function with money at their core. All of them. This is unprecedented. Whether we can sustain this remains to be seen.

Indeed, there are huge difficulties relying on money for social structure. The incentives are wrong. Worse, the social arena does not abide the "creative destruction" that serves industry so well. Social systems such as health care and education do not self-correct like buggy whip manufacturers. These systems involve unionized workers and suppliers who do not easily give up any of their livelihoods. Any attempts at meaningful change in systems meet virulent resistance. To the best of my knowledge, no society in the history of humankind has relied on money for as much of its social structure as we do.

And no society in the history of humankind has tolerated substantial portions of its citizens living on unearned income for more than half their lives. Such indulgence is quite difficult to support.

Then there is the relationship between work and money. For all of human history, there has been a necessary tie between work, i.e., the material contribution to the welfare of the social unit, and that community's access to goods and services. Yet that may be changing. Tasks that were formerly the province of man and muscle are now performed by powerful, dedicated machines ranging from huge cranes to highly developed nanotechnology that could become more sophisticated in the future. It seems our notions of earning and contributing are mutating. Will we be able to maintain the connections between work and money?

Of course, the "work" model has always been flawed if you take into account that there are some who are incompetent, incapable and inept. Communities based on natural resources, agriculture, fishing and mining have made up for this by sharing locally. But monetizing philanthropy and expanding government has had huge, largely unexplored implications.

Finally, what's wrong with money is that it is subject to human foible. It is no accident that money appears so much in the Bible.

This just scratches the surface of money's problems. For seven billion people attempting to survive on a vulnerable globe, money begs for exploration and discovery. It is a miracle of cosmic proportions. Still, as Ralph Waldo Emerson once poignantly observed: "Money often costs too much."

Richard B. Wagner, JD, CFP, is the principal of WorthLiving LLC, based in Denver. He is the 2003 recipient of the Financial Planning Association's P. Kemp Fain Jr. Award, which recognizes a member who has made outstanding contributions to the profession.