Yeah, people fixate on the money flow so much that they forget that there is another flow, in the opposite direction, the flow of the goods and labour, which is what the economy is actually all about... money is just so much easier to track, and account for, and aggregate (it's all just dollars!) so that the second flow is heavily de-emphasized.

Of course, when you look at just the flow of the goods and labour, the organization of a national economy in general seems highly, uh, round-about — the money serves as the main controlling/directing mechanism so without it in the picture things look pretty funky.