Who Said That Money Is The Root Of All Evil

The following is an excerpt from Atlas Shrugged, © Copyright, 1957, by Ayn Rand. It is reprinted in Commercialism Magazine past permission of the Manor of Ayn Rand. May not be reproduced elsewhere without the permission of her Manor.

"So you think that money is the root of all evil?" said Francisco d'Anconia. "Have you ever asked what is the root of coin? Coin is a tool of exchange, which can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Coin is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must bargain past trade and give value for value. Money is non the tool of the moochers, who claim your production by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible but by the men who produce. Is this what you lot consider evil?

"When you accept money in payment for your endeavour, you practice so merely on the conviction that y'all will commutation it for the product of the attempt of others. It is not the moochers or the looters who give value to coin. Not an ocean of tears not all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread y'all will need to survive tomorrow. Those pieces of paper, which should have been gold, are a token of honor–your claim upon the free energy of the men who produce. Your wallet is your statement of hope that somewhere in the world around yous there are men who volition non default on that moral principle which is the root of money. Is this what you consider evil?

"Accept you lot ever looked for the root of product? Take a look at an electric generator and dare tell yourself that it was created by the muscular endeavour of unthinking brutes. Try to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by men who had to discover information technology for the commencement time. Try to obtain your food by means of nothing but physical motions–and you'll learn that human'due south listen is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has always existed on globe.

"But you say that money is made past the stiff at the expense of the weak? What strength practise you mean? It is not the strength of guns or muscles. Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. Then is money made by the man who invents a motor at the expense of those who did not invent it? Is money made by the intelligent at the expense of the fools? By the able at the expense of the incompetent? By the ambitious at the expense of the lazy? Money is fabricated–before it tin be looted or mooched–made by the effort of every honest man, each to the extent of his power. An honest man is one who knows that he can't eat more than he has produced.'

"To trade by means of coin is the code of the men of skillful will. Money rests on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and his effort. Money allows no power to prescribe the value of your effort except the voluntary selection of the man who is willing to trade you his endeavor in return. Money permits y'all to obtain for your goods and your labor that which they are worth to the men who buy them, but no more than. Money permits no deals except those to common do good past the unforced judgment of the traders. Money demands of you the recognition that men must piece of work for their own do good, not for their own injury, for their gain, non their loss–the recognition that they are not beasts of burden, born to acquit the weight of your misery–that you must offer them values, non wounds–that the mutual bond amidst men is not the exchange of suffering, but the commutation of goods. Money demands that you lot sell, not your weakness to men's stupidity, merely your talent to their reason; it demands that you purchase, non the shoddiest they offer, but the best that your money can find. And when men live by merchandise–with reason, not strength, as their concluding arbiter–information technology is the best production that wins, the best performance, the human of all-time judgment and highest ability–and the caste of a man's productiveness is the degree of his reward. This is the lawmaking of beingness whose tool and symbol is coin. Is this what y'all consider evil?

"But money is merely a tool. Information technology volition accept you wherever you wish, but it will not replace yous as the driver. It volition give you the means for the satisfaction of your desires, but it will not provide you lot with desires. Money is the scourge of the men who attempt to reverse the police force of causality–the men who seek to replace the mind past seizing the products of the heed.

"Coin will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he wants: money volition not give him a lawmaking of values, if he's evaded the knowledge of what to value, and information technology volition not provide him with a purpose, if he's evaded the choice of what to seek. Money will not buy intelligence for the fool, or adoration for the coward, or respect for the incompetent. The man who attempts to purchase the brains of his superiors to serve him, with his money replacing his judgment, ends up by condign the victim of his inferiors. The men of intelligence desert him, but the cheats and the frauds come up flocking to him, fatigued by a police which he has not discovered: that no homo may be smaller than his money. Is this the reason why you phone call information technology evil?

"Just the man who does not need information technology, is fit to inherit wealth–the man who would make his ain fortune no matter where he started. If an heir is equal to his money, it serves him; if not, it destroys him. But y'all look on and you cry that money corrupted him. Did it? Or did he corrupt his coin? Do non envy a worthless heir; his wealth is not yours and you would take done no meliorate with information technology. Do not call back that it should take been distributed among you; loading the world with fifty parasites instead of 1, would not bring back the dead virtue which was the fortune. Money is a living ability that dies without its root. Money volition not serve the heed that cannot lucifer it. Is this the reason why you call information technology evil?

"Money is your means of survival. The verdict you pronounce upon the source of your livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon your life. If the source is corrupt, you lot have damned your own beingness. Did you lot get your coin by fraud? By pandering to men'southward vices or men's stupidity? Past catering to fools, in the hope of getting more than your ability deserves? By lowering your standards? By doing work you despise for purchasers you scorn? If so, so your coin volition non give y'all a moment's or a penny's worth of joy. Then all the things you purchase volition become, not a tribute to you, but a reproach; not an achievement, but a reminder of shame. Then you lot'll scream that coin is evil. Evil, considering it would non pinch-hit for your self-respect? Evil, considering it would non let you bask your depravity? Is this the root of your hatred of money?

"Money volition always remain an effect and pass up to supplant you as the crusade. Money is the product of virtue, but information technology will non give yous virtue and it will non redeem your vices. Money will not give yous the unearned, neither in matter nor in spirit. Is this the root of your hatred of money?

"Or did yous say it's the love of money that's the root of all evil? To dearest a matter is to know and honey its nature. To love money is to know and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your attempt for the endeavor of the best among men. It'southward the person who would sell his soul for a nickel, who is loudest in proclaiming his hatred of money–and he has good reason to hate information technology. The lovers of coin are willing to work for information technology. They know they are able to deserve it.

"Let me give you a tip on a inkling to men'due south characters: the human who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it.

"Run for your life from any homo who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper's bell of an budgeted looter. So long as men live together on globe and demand means to deal with 1 another–their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun.

"Only money demands of yous the highest virtues, if you wish to brand it or to continue it. Men who have no courage, pride or cocky-esteem, men who have no moral sense of their correct to their money and are not willing to defend it as they defend their life, men who apologize for being rich–volition not remain rich for long. They are the natural bait for the swarms of looters that stay nether rocks for centuries, but come crawling out at the first scent of a man who begs to be forgiven for the guilt of owning wealth. They will hasten to salvage him of the guilt–and of his life, as he deserves.

"Then yous will see the ascent of the men of the double standard–the men who live past force, yet count on those who alive by trade to create the value of their looted money–the men who are the hitchhikers of virtue. In a moral society, these are the criminals, and the statutes are written to protect you confronting them. But when a lodge establishes criminals-by-correct and looters-past-police force–men who employ strength to seize the wealth of disarmed victims–then money becomes its creators' avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, in one case they've passed a law to disarm them. But their boodle becomes the magnet for other looters, who get information technology from them as they got it. So the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And and so that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter.

"Exercise you wish to know whether that day is coming? Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society's virtue. When you lot meet that trading is done, not by consent, but past compulsion–when yous see that in order to produce, you demand to obtain permission from men who produce null–when you see that coin is flowing to those who deal, not in appurtenances, but in favors–when you encounter that men get richer by graft and by pull than by piece of work, and your laws don't protect y'all confronting them, just protect them against you lot–when you run into corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice–you may know that your guild is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that it does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. Information technology will non allow a country to survive every bit half-property, half-loot.

"Whenever destroyers appear amid men, they start by destroying coin, for coin is men's protection and the base of a moral beingness. Destroyers seize gold and go out to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it bounces, marked, 'Account overdrawn.'

"When y'all have made evil the means of survival, do non expect men to remain expert. Do non expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Practice not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do non inquire, 'Who is destroying the world? You are.

"You stand in the midst of the greatest achievements of the greatest productive civilization, and you wonder why information technology'due south crumbling effectually you lot, while you lot're damning its life-blood–coin. You look upon money as the savages did earlier yous, and you wonder why the jungle is creeping back to the edge of your cities. Throughout men's history, money was always seized by looters of one brand or another, whose names changed, but whose method remained the aforementioned: to seize wealth by forcefulness and to keep the producers spring, demeaned, defamed, deprived of honor. That phrase near the evil of money, which you mouth with such righteous recklessness, comes from a time when wealth was produced by the labor of slaves–slaves who repeated the motions once discovered by somebody's heed and left unimproved for centuries. Then long as production was ruled by force, and wealth was obtained by conquest, in that location was little to conquer, Still through all the centuries of stagnation and starvation, men exalted the looters, as aristocrats of the sword, as aristocrats of nascence, as aristocrats of the bureau, and despised the producers, equally slaves, equally traders, as shopkeepers–as industrialists.

"To the glory of mankind, there was, for the first and only time in history, a country of money–and I have no higher, more reverent tribute to pay to America, for this means: a state of reason, justice, liberty, production, achievement. For the first time, homo'southward listen and coin were gear up costless, and there were no fortunes-by-conquest, but just fortunes-past-piece of work, and instead of swordsmen and slaves, there appeared the real maker of wealth, the greatest worker, the highest type of human being being–the self-made human–the American industrialist.

"If you lot ask me to proper noun the proudest distinction of Americans, I would cull–because it contains all the others–the fact that they were the people who created the phrase 'to make money.' No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had ever idea of wealth as a static quantity–to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted or obtained equally a favor. Americans were the showtime to understand that wealth has to exist created. The words 'to make money' concur the essence of human morality.

"Nevertheless these were the words for which Americans were denounced by the rotted cultures of the looters' continents. At present the looters' credo has brought you to regard your proudest achievements every bit a hallmark of shame, your prosperity as guilt, your greatest men, the industrialists, as blackguards, and your magnificent factories as the production and property of muscular labor, the labor of whip-driven slaves, like the pyramids of Egypt. The rotter who simpers that he sees no deviation between the ability of the dollar and the power of the whip, ought to learn the difference on his own hibernate– as, I recall, he volition.

"Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you lot enquire for your own destruction. When money ceases to be the tool past which men deal with ane another, so men get the tools of men. Claret, whips, and guns–or dollars. Take your choice–there is no other–and your fourth dimension is running out."

The following is an excerpt from Atlas Shrugged, © Copyright, 1957, by Ayn Rand . Information technology is reprinted in Capitalism Magazine past permission of the Estate of Ayn Rand. May not be reproduced elsewhere without the permission of her Estate.

Source: https://www.capitalismmagazine.com/2002/08/franciscos-money-speech/

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