The following is THE most profound explanation of money that you will EVER read.
I suggest you read it, and then read it again . . . and again.
From ATLAS SHRUGGED, by Ayn Rand, page 387:
Rearden heard Bertram Scudder, outside the group,
say to a girl who made some sound of indignation, "Don't
let him disturb you. You know,
money is the root of all
evil—and he's the typical product of money."
Rearden did not think that Francisco could have
heard it, but he saw Francisco turning to them with a
gravely courteous smile.
"So you think that money is the root of all evil?"
said Francisco d'Aconia. "Have you ever asked what is the
root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can't
exist unless there are goods produced and men able to
produce them. Money is the material shape of the
principle that men who wish to
deal with one another must
deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the
tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or
of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is
made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what
you consider evil?
"When you accept money in payment for your effort,
you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it
for the product of the effort of others. It is not the
moochers or the looters who give value to money. Not an
ocean of tears nor all the guns in the world can transform
those pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread you
will need to survive tomorrow. Those pieces of paper, which
should have been
gold, are a token of honor— your claim
upon the energy of the men who produce. Your wallet is
your statement of hope that somewhere in the world around
you there are men who will not default on that moral
principle which is the root of money. Is this what you
consider evil?
"Have you ever looked for the root of production?
Take a look at an electric generator and dare tell yourself
that it was created by the muscular effort of unthinking
brutes. Try to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge
left to you by men who had to discover it for the first
time. Try to obtain your food by means of nothing but
physical motions—and you'll learn that man's mind is the
root of all the goods produced and of all the
wealth that
has ever existed on earth.
"But you say that money is made by the strong at the
expense of the weak? What strength do 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
MADE—before it can be looted or mooched—made by the
effort of every honest man, each to the extent of his
ability. An honest man is one who knows that he can't
consume more than he has produced.
"To trade by means of money is the code of the men
of good 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 by the
voluntary choice of the man who is willing to trade you
his effort in return. Money permits you to obtain for your
goods and your labor that which they are worth to the men
who buy them, but no more. Money permits no deals except
those to mutual benefit by the unforced judgment of the
traders. Money demands of you the recognition that men
must work for their own benefit, not for their own injury,
for their gain, not their loss—the recognition that they
are not beasts of burden, born to carry the weight of your
misery—that you must offer them values, not wounds—that
the common bond among men is not the exchange of suffering,
but the exchange of GOODS. Money demands that you sell, not
your weakness to men's stupidity, but your talent to their
reason; it demands that you buy, not the shoddiest they
offer, but the best your money can find. And when men
live by trade—with reason, not force, as their final
arbiter—it is the best product that wins, the best
performance, then man of best judgment and highest
ability—and the degree of a man's productiveness is the
degree of his reward. This is the code of existence whose
tool and symbol is money. Is this what you consider evil?
"But money is only a tool. It will take you
wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the
driver. It will give you the means for the satisfaction of
your desires, but it will not provide you with desires.
Money is the scourge of the men who attempt to reverse the
law of causality—the men who seek to replace the mind by
seizing the products of the mind.
"Money will not purchase happiness for the man who
has no concept of what he wants; money will not give him a
code of values, if he's evaded the knowledge of what to
value, and it will 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 admiration 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 becoming the
victim of his inferiors. The men of intelligence desert
him, but the cheats and the frauds come flocking to him,
drawn by a law which he has not discovered: that no man may
be smaller than his money. Is this the reason why you call
it evil?
"Only the man who does not need it, is fit to
inherit wealth—the man who would make his own fortune no
matter where he started. If an heir is equal to his money,
it serves him; if not, it destroys him. But you look on
and you cry that money corrupted him. Did it? Or did he
corrupt his money? Do not envy a worthless heir; his wealth
is not yours and you would have done no better with it. Do
not think that it should have been distributed among you;
loading the world with fifty parasites instead of one,
would not bring back the dead virtue which was the fortune.
Money is a living power that dies without its root. Money
will not serve that mind that cannot match it. Is this the
reason why you call it evil?
"Money is your means of survival. The verdict which
you pronounce upon the source of your livelihood is the
verdict you pronounce upon your life. If the source is
corrupt, you have damned your own existence. Did you get
your money by fraud? By pandering to men's vices or men's
stupidity? By 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, then your money will not give you a
moment's or a penny's worth of joy. Then all the things
you buy will become, not a tribute to you, but a reproach;
not an achievement, but a reminder of shame. Then you'll
scream that money is evil. Evil, because it would not
pinch-hit for your self-respect? Evil, because it would
not let you enjoy your depravity? Is this the root of your
hatred of money?
"Money will always remain an effect and refuse to
replace you as the cause. Money is the product of virtue,
but it will not give you virtue and it will not redeem your
vices. Money will not give you the unearned, neither in
matter nor in spirit. Is this the root of your hatred of
money?
"Or did you say it's the LOVE of money that's the
root of all evil? To love a thing is to know and love 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 effort for the effort of the
best among men. It's the person who would sell his soul for
a nickel, who is the loudest in proclaiming his hatred of
money—and he has good reason to hate it. The lovers of
money are willing to work for it. They know they are able
to deserve it."
"Let me give you a tip on a clue to men's
characters: the man who damns money has obtained it
dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it.
"Run for your life from any man who tells you that
money is evil. That sentence is the leper's bell of an
approaching looter. So long as men live together on earth
and need means to deal with one another—their only
substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun.
"But money demands of you the highest virtues, if
you wish to make it or to keep it. Men who have no
courage, pride, or self-esteem, men who have no moral sense
of their right to their money and are not willing to defend
it as they defend their life, men who apologize for being
rich—will not remain rich for long. They are the natural
bait for the swarms of looters that stay under rocks for
centuries, but come crawling out at the first smell of a
man who begs to be forgiven for the guilt of owning
wealth. They will hasten to relieve him of the guilt—and
of his life, as he deserves.
"Then you will see the rise of the double
standard—the men who live by force, yet count on those who
live 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 against them. But when a
society establishes criminals-by-right and
looters-by-law—men who use force to seize the wealth of
DISARMED victims—then money becomes its creators' avenger.
Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once
they've passed a law to disarm them. But their loot
becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them
as they got it. Then 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 then that society vanishes, in a spread of
ruins and slaughter.
"Do you wish to know whether that day is coming?
Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society's virtue.
When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by
compulsion—when you see that in order to produce, you need
to obtain permission from men who produce nothing—when
you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in
goods, but in favors—when you see that men get richer by
graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect
you against them, but protect them against you—when you
see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a
self-sacrifice—you may know that your society is doomed.
Money is so noble a medium that it does not compete with
guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will
not permit a country to survive as half-property,
half-loot.
"Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by
destroying money, for money is men's protection and the
base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave
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 becomes, marked: 'Account overdrawn.'
"When you have made evil the means of survival, do
not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay
moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the
fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when
production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask,
'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
it's crumbling around you, while your damning its
life-blood—money. You look upon money as the savages did
before you, 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,
but whose method remained the same: to seize wealth by
force and to keep the producers bound, demeaned, defamed,
deprived of honor. That phrase about 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 mind and left unimproved for centuries. So
long as production was ruled by force, and wealth was
obtained by conquest, there was little to conquer. Yet
through all the centuries of stagnation and starvation, men
exalted the looters, as aristocrats of the sword, as
aristocrats of birth, as aristocrats of the bureau, and
despised the producers, as slaves, as 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 country of reason, justice, freedom, production,
achievement. For the first time, man's mind and money
were set free, and there were no fortunes-by-conquest, but
only fortunes-by-work, and instead of swordsmen and slaves,
there appeared the real maker of wealth, the greatest
worker, the highest type of human being—the self-made
man—the American industrialist.
"If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of
Americans, I would choose—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 always thought of
wealth as a static quantity—to be seized, begged,
inherited, shared, looted, or obtained as a favor.
Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to
be created. The words 'to make money' hold the essence of
human morality.
"Yet these were the words for which Americans were
denounced by the rotted cultures of the looters'
continents. Now the looters' credo has brought you to
regard your proudest achievements as a hallmark of shame,
your prosperity as guilt, your greatest men, the
industrialists, as blackguards, and your magnificent
factories as the product and property of muscular labor,
the labor of whip-driven slaves, like the pyramids of
Egypt. The rotter who simpers that he sees no difference
between the power of the dollar and the power of the whip,
ought to learn the difference on his own hide-as, I think,
he will.
"Until and unless you discover that money is the
root of all good, you ask for your own destruction.
When
money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one
another, then men become the tools of men. Blood, whips
and guns—or dollars. Take your choice—there is no
other—and your time is running out."
