...and human labor acting on them to produce useful goods and services.

Everything else is bullshit.

Sure, we may need money as a medium of exchange, a means of keeping score, and a way to equate different commodities. You know, like a rook is equal to a knight and two pawns.

But money, by itself, has no value. It doesn't matter whether we're talking precious metals, paper currency, or Bitcoin. It is an abstraction that we use for convenience. The Law of Supply and Demand (you will note my sarcastic yet reverent use of capital letters) is merely a statement that says when a lot of people want something that is scarce, they will be willing to give up more for it than they would otherwise.

That's not a law of physics, its just an unquantifiable statement of the obvious blended with a bit of the unprovable.

And economics may call itself a science, but I see it as merely a way for justifying a specific ideology. Economics, like religion, divides itself into conflicting faiths that primarily exist to legitimize the political regimes it serves. The two major schools, Capitalism and Marxism, not only conflict dramatically, they are both divided into sects that primarily exist to argue increasingly minute irrelevancies.

Now, would someone explain to me how an Andy Warhol print can sell for millions of dollars while the sheet music (or the Yo Yo Ma recording) of the Bach Cello Suites can be purchased for just a few dollars?