Money used to just be precious metal or correspond to it, so no this isn't how it's been from the start.
Why resource-constrained? It's money, not something with utility. In any expanding economy, you generally get more buying power spending later rather than now, regardless of changes in money supply. Only if the currency is being diluted too much, you have to park your savings in something scarce instead, like land or low-risk stocks. It's not all that different from just using a fixed supply of currency (I'm not counting lending as creating money; it's not the same thing).