… is from page 183 of Armen Alchian’s brilliant 1968 International Encyclopedia of Social Sciences essay, “Cost,” as this essay is reprinted in The Collected Works of Armen A. Alchian (2006), Volume 1 (“Choice and Cost Under Uncertainty”; Daniel K. Benjamin, ed.):
The use of money prices does not mean that money is all that counts, or that people love money. It means simply that money is the medium of exchange and therefore is the convenient denominator of interpersonal exchange values of events or options.