Money represents work done.
To properly represent something, it has to behave the same way as the thing it represents.
You claim that the laws governing money are arbitrary.
To the extent that our government and people we mistakenly regard as economic experts make what they THINK are laws, that’s true. However, there are consequences when we attempt to break a law of physics, and they are observable when we define our money to behave as though it can violate the laws of thermodynamics. The laws we have and the way we use money have provided us with many easily observable consequences.
The laws in terms of money are constant and consistent. The breakage in our society, from financial crises to global war and potentially species extinction, are consequences of the laws we make that ignore them.
Money CANNOT make more money. I do not care how high the pile of gold is; it does not produce a single additional gram of gold. It NEVER happens.
No matter what form that ownership takes, if more money appeared, work was added. It may be the work of the Sun or the work of victims, willing or unwilling, but it is not work that the legal condition of ownership produced. That legal condition cannot be converted into work, energy, or matter. When we make laws that say it can, we provide an unnatural and insatiable need for growth.
I’ll suggest that you consider Frederick Soddy, who was ahead of this a hundred years ago.
One cannot define money independent of “value.”
Horse Puckey. It is defined in terms of work. The work may or may not have value, but it is the work previously done to get the money that is important to the individual using the money. It is our work that gives value to OUR money, but for a society, the money it creates is a way to measure work that has value to the entire society.
Money is used to measure value at the level of the individual. It has value to each of us that depends on the work we must do to get OUR money. So, between individuals, the value of money will indeed be “subjective,” using the messed-up definitions we currently endure.
But your money still follows the laws. My money still obeys the laws. We use it to measure value, but it still has to go out of date like a newspaper.
You can say I am wrong, but you are nowhere near providing evidence of that.
Money represents work.
Work can be valuable to society or not (consider Bitcoin).
But it cannot represent work if it does not follow the same laws that work must follow.