I’ve written, prescriptively, that money shouldn’t buy anything that matters: not healthcare or education, for example.
Anything we can do, we can afford
But at the top level money can’t buy anything you couldn’t do anyway. Anything we can’t do, we can only buy from others. The Britian of the thirties was still, despite all its problems, a great industrial power. They could do most things, and it was ridiculous to pretend they didn’t have the money. They could build ships and buildings and refine medicines and so on.
There we some things they couldn’t do: they couldn’t produce as much food as they wanted: they bad to buy that from others. But since other people wanted what they could do, they would accept British pounds.
And there were things no one could do, and money wouldn’t buy those things: go to the moon, for example.