BEING HONEST WITH YOURSELF R EALITY CHECK: T HROW away a four-dollar magazine you never got around to reading—easy. Toss in the garbage five dollars’ worth of food that’s gone bad; you may reprimand yourself, but you probably do it all the time. Buy a sweater on sale for thirty dollars, then notice si x months later that you wore it only once; it just didn’t fit right; you give it away. Now try to rip up and throw away a dollar bill. I have found almost no one who could do this without great discomfort. Yet everything about the way the money establishment functions is calculated to distance us from our money, to anesthetize us to its power. The plastic card that slides through the machine so smoothly when we make our purchases; the automated voice of the bank’s telephone answering system that robotically answers our money questions; the digital electro...