Hey, wait a minute - this "money" is government fiction...

It's a government-licensed figment of a the FRB's imagination distributed to the rest of the civilization mostly as numbers that represent pieces of paper that will never be printed that would (if they were printed) represent a kind of shadow of a metal (it explicitly does not represent the metal) that has mostly symbolic value. Without the government, it just plain doesn't exist. As it is, it comes about as close to not existing as you can get and still utterly dominate a culture. Other than God.