Money?

On page 143 of The Barbaric Heart, White explains what he thinks is the reason that capitalism is not a value-neutral economic system, but a system which encourages immorality. I've been waiting for someone to explain this to me for awhile now, so I was pretty excited that White made the attempt.

I'm not entirely sure about what he said, though. According to White "Money under capitalism represents a fundamental inversion of value. Instead of representing things, things come to represent so much money." He goes on to give the example that people on PBS' Antique Road Show get really excited when they find out that their antiques are worth a whole bunch of money.

My question is...Why do people get excited about things that cost a lot of money? I think it's normally either that they see large amounts of money as an indication of high social status or that they're awed by how many real, tangible things they could buy with that amount of money. If the former is the case, I would like White to explain how capitalism has caused people to equate money with social status (I'm pretty sure that happened before capitalism) and if the latter is the case, then his argument is shot. And of course there's the third option that I'm just missing something...Anybody want to point it out?

As a side note, if anyone's interested I did a bit of research about the history of money: from bartering, to commodity money to representative money to fiat money. Here's a super basic (and poorly edited, sorry) article from about.com:

http://inventors.about.com/od/mstartinventions/a/money.htm. I didn't really find any insights. Although there are a lot of people who take issue with the fiat money system which we are currently using, I don't think that's what White is trying to get at here.