Not as a slogan. As a fact about what money is, once you take it apart.
Before the machine economy makes sense, one thing has to be unlearned: that money is a finite substance we run out of. It is not. It is a ledger of claims on value, value is intelligence turning energy into order, and on a long enough timescale with enough intelligence, the ledger has only one true wall, and it is made of physics. We start from what an economy even is, then five toys prove the rest to you rather than tell you.
Before any of the ideas below, the plainest picture. An economy is not a pile of money. It is water. Value pours in from two taps, human labour and bank credit, runs through pipes we call banks and markets, most of it drains straight back out as the things we buy, and whatever is left pools in reservoirs we call assets. It leaks at every joint: tax, fees, inflation. That is the whole machine, and it has run on human hands for all of history.
Two things to carry forward. The taps are not fixed, and the credit tap stretches a long way, held back by who is willing and safe to lend to rather than by any fixed stock, which is the first hint that money is elastic. And the reservoir keeps filling as long as value is produced, which is the first hint that there is no natural ceiling. Everything after this is what happens when a machine takes the taps.
A glass of water is worth nothing beside a river and everything in a desert. The water did not change. What changed is the gap between how much someone wants it and how much there is. Value is that gap. It lives in the relationship, never in the object.
Hold that. Nothing has intrinsic worth. Value gets created every time a new want meets a new scarcity, and both keep appearing, so there is no point where the last of it has been made. The pie is not fixed, it is drawn as we go.
Money is not gold and not paper. It is a shared memory of who is owed what: a ledger of claims on value yet to be delivered. And here is the part that undoes the finite-substance idea entirely. Most money is not printed by a government. It is spoken into existence by banks, every time they lend. A loan is a new entry in the ledger, a claim that did not exist a second before.
That toy runs the story the wrong way round on purpose. Banks do not lend out a stack of reserves they are sitting on. A bank creates a new deposit the moment it lends to someone creditworthy, and the reserves catch up after, which is why several central banks now set the reserve requirement at zero. The Bank of England said this plainly in 2014, and so does the reference for this reader, The Global Money River: commercial banks create most broad money by lending, and the money supply answers to the appetite to borrow, not to a fixed stock of anything. The dial in the toy is a story we told, not the real lever.
So money is elastic. But money is only worth something if there is real value behind it. Where does that come from? Careful here, because this looks like a different meaning of value than section 2. The ratio there is what a thing is worth to someone. This is what it costs to make. Intelligence lowers the cost of making order, which floods supply and pushes any one thing's worth down, so what climbs is the total, the sheer count of wants that can be met at once, not the price of any single one. Strip it to physics. Value is order: a pile of sand made into a chip, ore made into a bridge, noise made into a sentence that helps. Making order takes two things, energy to pay for it and intelligence to know which arrangement is worth making. Turn both up and you make value faster than it decays.
Human intelligence has been the scarce dial for all of history. It is the one that stayed roughly fixed while energy grew. The whole bet of the machine economy is that this dial is about to stop being scarce, and start climbing toward its physical limit. When it does, the value it can conjure from the same energy climbs with it.
Put the three together. Value is a ratio that can always be created. Money is a ledger that stretches to hold it. And the value behind the money is intelligence times energy, one dial of which is about to run toward its limit. So how much money can there be? The honest answer is that there is no economic ceiling. There is only a physical one, absurdly far away, made of the total order the universe permits before it runs down.
This is what "money is theoretically infinite" actually means. Not that you can print your way rich, and not that scarcity is a lie today. It means the quantity of value the universe can be arranged into, over all the time there is, is finite but so large that no economic force gets anywhere near it. The only cap is physics, and physics sits absurdly far past anything money has ever counted. Money is only the count of that value. On any timescale a human cares about, its ceiling is indistinguishable from infinity, and the thing that lifts it is intelligence.
If value has no ceiling and intelligence is the lever, then the question that matters is who works the lever. That is the whole rest of this reader.