Money from Nothing?
I resist saying that on computers we create something from nothing. One opens a software word processor and it looks like a blank slate. I press a letter on the keyboard. It seems as though it came from nowhere, but I shouldn't forget the time it took the computer to process the pressing of the button, nor that time expended by my hand traversing the distance to trigger the signal to the computer, and--perhaps--finally, the moment I used up in thinking to press the button.
Most have heard that time is money, so let's not ever discount our time as nothing. The things we create, whether good or bad, consciously or carelessly--we create them using the most precious scarce resource in our social existence: time.
Unlike the scarcity of agriculture growing seasonally, gold jewelry sold in thousands of stores, or oxygen held compressed in tanks; the scarcity of time has no possible competing goods. Nothing can replace time gone and if poorly used we might call it time lost.
Consider the tragedy, then, of a society of people who spend their lives choosing how to spend their time using a faulty measuring stick. Imagine the economic tragedy of the historical human being: for all of recorded account we have subjected ourselves to the valuations of fiat. Governments cannot create money from nothing! They cannot magically manifest value, or utility, by sheer command. The tragedy of this system is that fiat creates money from the time of the people trapped by it. Fiat is human beings. When we spend this money we are spending away the time, the lives of our people.