Boy, some of you people really should read up on economics before posting.

But then again, even most economists don't know what they are talking about. So I don't blame you.

Money is simply coined or printed property. Property is the base requirement for any economy. It's a legal title that gives you the right to perform basic economic operations with it, like buying, selling, impawning, renting, raising mortgages, leasing, etc.

Thus, money is not a medium of exchange. There has never been, in all history, any occurence of money being used as a form of exchange, like >>6 implies.

Marxism-Leninism abolished property (though it pretended to only abolish "private property") and thus took away all base for any kind of economy, effectively ruining the existing wealth of any society.

Scarcity of ressources isn't the basic drive behind an economy, either, like >>7 said. A good example here is to compare Russia and Japan. The former has always had a tremendous ammount of natural ressources but has never managed to do anything with it. Japan, with almost no natural ressources, has grown to become one of the top industrial forces on the globe.

The basic drive behind any economy, that is to say: any society that works based on economical principles, is interest which is generated by issuing credits. The need to pay back a certain ammount of property units in a certain ammount of time + x is what generates the continuous accumulation of property by almost all members of said societies.