Go right ahead. If you honestly beleive that money is a tool intended to "work for society" then there is nothing that I can do to change your mind. Nor would I care to try, you're as free to be wrong as the next guy. And yes, I want a tool that works for me, for I am the only person that I can trust to best handle my tools. The prisoner's delima doesn't apply to free market trades in the absense of third party coersion, so in a free society wherein the vast majority of economic interactions occur in the absence of such coersion, it's literally impossible for the collection of individual interactions (presumedly favorable to both sides of the trade) to be a net negative for society.
Think, young man, think. Think for yourself, not just how your professor expects you to react.
I feel that there are also several assumptions at work here. That government is synonymous with society (implicit in the idea that a currency needs to be controlled to be beneficial to society) and that the government would act in the interest of that society in its actions (likewise).
I see, as I suspect Moonshadow does, that money is a tool that is used by individuals and that the actions of those individuals sums to the interactions of society. The extraction of "the needs of society" as something to be sheparded is simply collectivism and is used as a pretext so subsume the needs and rights of the individual.
The part I highlighted is absolutely correct; the latter part is probably also correct, but is irrelevent to the core issue. The specualtion about the reasons why are simply value judgements. Political perspectives infecting the conversation again. Again, it's not that I'm disagreeing with your speculations; just that they aren't really material to whether or not money "works for society" or not. Unless, of course, one considers collectivism to "work" for society, so perhaps I just contradicted myself.