The original statement is about the tie between money and reputation. In the pure state, when things are working cleanly, money is analogous to a type of reputation: it's the score for how much service your actions have rendered to the world, in aggregate. If you read Mises, that's what you will take away.

If you're a mostly sane person living in actual reality who is not totally deluded by some kind of ideological bagholding, you will also recognize many ways in which this formulation goes obviously wrong, at least for any semantics meaningful for normal life. But that doesn't mean there's no signal in it.