… is from page 60 of the 1990 Liberty Fund edition of Vera Smith’s superb 1936 volume, The Rationale of Central Banking and the Free Banking Alternative:
The public mind entertained exaggerated hopes as to the power of banking. It was a widespread belief that all that was necessary to relieve a scarcity of capital was an elastic note issue, and the issue of notes was still thought to possess something akin to a magic power of transforming poverty into wealth.
Here Smith is speaking of mid-19th-century German states, but the magical thinking she describes is, of course, among the most common fallacies to be found across time and space. People frequently mistake money for prosperity. The veil of money is, for such people, a curtain hiding from their view all that is real and most relevant.
