When Bishop Berkeley in The Querist (1737) asked “And whether the true Idea of Money, as such, be not altogether that of a Ticket or Counter?”, he was clearly on to something important. But if one tries to suggest that money is a ticket, one will run into fierce resistance.
On Twitter, George Selgin is sceptical of the idea that money is some kind of ticket or "credit medium". As he writes: "If Wimpy offers a gold coin for a hamburger today, he's not proposing a credit transaction as he would by offering to make compensation on Tuesday!". Selgin also points out that the restaurant is in no way obliged to give Wimpy anything for the coin.
Point taken, Mr Selgin. You are fighting the last war, though. We are not proponents of Chartalism, nor do we do monetary theory by way of metaphors. That is why we refuse to call money a (government) IOU, liability or a ticket. As you said, metaphors are misleading in that they work only until they don’t.
But what if money is a counter? That is what we mean by a recordkeeping device. Our claim is that money is used to record the cumulative trading histories of agents. They participate in the system of their own free will, and decide whom to sell to and who to buy from. The guiding rule of the system is an intertemporal budget balance (sales = purchases), which we could call "the law of reciprocity"[1]. The participants might not understand how the system works, but the system is usually robust enough to survive despite this ignorance.
