Originally posted by mmerlin
This topic reminds me of an interesting (fiction) book I am reading at the moment:
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. My father recently gave this book to me to read and whilst I find it a bit idealistic, I am also finding it inspirational on a self-reliance and "accountability for my own actions" level.
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MMerlin, glad you're enjoying its.. its a great read!
The book contains a great Ode To Money.."Francisco's Money Speech"
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, 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
aribitrary 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 aristocarats 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,ark 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."
