Earlier quoted context omitted.
That and the government is paying all its employees salaries with that money, and it accepts paiements with that currency too. It’s what all the crypto currency people completely misunderstand whenever they’re bringing the « every currency is a matter of trust ». Indeed, ultimately paper is just paper, but the guarantees and legal bindings behind that paper are what makes it easier to grant « trust » and thus value.
The constitution allowed for the government to coin currency. Literally out of metals. That was gamed with tickets for gold, aka dollars. That was gamed even further by removing it from the gold standard. That causes weird things like the metal value of the coin being worth more than the face value and a bunch of news stories about how it is illegal to melt down your worth less coins. We now effectively have communis…
A lot of the investment that got us here depended on people actually having some incentive not to bury their dollars in the ground.