There will always be extremists on both the left and the right, but reality generally lies somewhere in the middle. I believe there is room in this game for the concept of public property, or community property, owned and operated from the coffers of the fort as a distinct entity from the dwarves. Currently the game is almost exclusively a communist, left-wing view that everything belongs to The People, save a few small private items. Even to the point of being too much so, begging for a little capitolist innovation.
Reversing the situation so that everything is owned and operated by a dwarf might also be extremist, and maybe the solution resides somewhere in between, where we declare a public goods and have a chaperon oversee the common goods. Probably a noble, maybe the mayor, maybe a treasurer. The flow of money to/from the commons would be in the form of rent, and maybe a tax taken off the top of all material goods produced in the fort.
This might put the player in the Fun position of having enough dwarves, but being too low on resources to pay them for any work. Here again, the government makes a promise for future delivery of goods, in the form of promisary coin. The idea being that in better times, the dwarves can come and trade those coins in to the Treasurer for meals, crops, or metals that they might want for their personal use.
Then we have a system with at least two forms of currency, the food coins from the farmer, and the unspecified coins from the treasury. The treasury coins need more clarity, so let's say they trade for a bar of metal, as chosen by the player when he mints them.
The player is free to mint way more coins than there is metal to trade, which brings up more opportunities for Fun. If a dwarf goes to cash one in when there's no metal to back it up, what happens? "Come back later" can get old, and so it should probably cause an unhappy thought. So if the player chooses to set up unbacked coin, and not bother to back it up later, then the citizens could experience a lot of bad thoughts as they attempt to trade their money in for metal. They might even be less inclined to accept government coin while they are experiencing a bad thought from unbacked currency.