As an example, do you think stay-at-home parents add no value to society (or if you want, let's say "the economy") because they are not paid directly for their services? Are charity workers or volunteers "merit-less"?
Honestly it always surprises me to hear this on HN, the idea that work isn’t being done unless it’s generating dollar value for someone. What is open source coding then? Not work because it’s not done under the purview of an employer for a salary? Not valuable because no one gave you a dollar for it?
From this perspective, the accumulation of money is merely the interruption of this specialization process. The idea of ascribing value to an interruption of a system that is otherwise trying to be balanced gives the impression that somebody is too lazy to figure out what they really want out of their life and they simply enjoy having the option even if it means that the other side is waiting for you to act.
It gets especially perverse during recessions where everyone is trying to acquire money for the sake of safety and security when all it really means is that you order people to stop working for the very reason that motivated you to save money, the fear of unemployment.
If we want to get really precise, we can say that people give other people money for any number of subjective reasons, but the large majority of the time it's because the person wants something from the other party that the other party isn't willing to do without compensation. So money most of the time represents subjective value add that wouldn't otherwise have occurred without it. Cleaning services, manufacturing, specific engineering work, construction, etc.