Money is certainly that, but it's also a whole lot more.
As the incredibly prescient Miss Rand put it:
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.
Without goods and services produced which people desire money is nothing but prettily colored bits of paper with absolutely no intrinsic value of its own.
Rand continues:
"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."
Money is the ultimate symbol of the trust a society places in its members. Without that trust money once again becomes nothing more than worthless paper. We use money as a store for the excess value of our time. The more valuable our time is to the other members of our society, the more money we earn with which to store that value.
When a society ceases to trust its own, money becomes worthless and one is back to barter. For proof of this one need look no farther than a country like Zimbabwe where 'inflation' is running something like 100% a week IIRC.
It's not that the actual value of the goods in Zimbabwe is rising. A loaf of bread is, after all, still the same on Friday as it was the previous Monday.
What's happened is that that bond of trust between the members of Zim society is gone so they no longer have a medium of exchange worthy of trust. Zim government doesn't trust its citizens and vice versa, and the citizens no longer trust each other. Therefore what they use to trade with one another, money, has become worthless.
What money allows you to do is take care of the top level of Maslow's hierarchy of needs - self-actualization
This is absolutely correct and it's one of the best short explanations I've ever seen as to what the power of money actually is. It's not that it can buy pretty baubles, fancy cars, or attract the attention of attractive members of the opposite sex (although that is a nice side-benefit to having money...LOL)
Anyone who would deny me the fruits of my labors, driven by my intense desire to be self-acutalize, is nothing more than a petty dictator who believes they know more what's good for me than I do.
Once again you show why I consider you to be one of the finer posters on the forum. This is an incredibly important point which even most conservatives are unable to articulate. You are to be congratulated for making the point so succinctly.
Rand said it a bit differently, but the idea is the same:
"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.
There are only two ways for people to deal with each other in this world. We can freely and voluntarily trade with each other with absolutely the bare minimum of interference from Government which should take only that amount it absolutely requires in order to do some very basic and clearly defined tasks. Our Founders understood this and laid out those tasks very clearly in our Constitution.
Or we can devalue our fellow citizens by implying that they somehow obtained their money fraudulently and then force them to our will with the muzzles of guns. There are no other ways no matter what anyone tells you, although Hillary and her ilk will try. They'll usually do it by mouthing platitudes about 'the common good' when we both know there really is no such thing.
Finally Miss Rand left us with a warning which we ignore to our mortal peril:
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 is 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.
This last line is why the Zim 'dollar, the Cuban peso, the Russian Ruble, and the ChiCom yuan are not used internationally and most likely never will be. Money will not permit itself to be debased like that. It can't. Rational people won't trust a 'currency' which isn't based on the idea that people own themselves, even if they can't articulate that idea aloud.
Lastly there is this:
"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."
Time is indeed running out. Just today we had a 'serious' Presidential candidate utter out loud on national television the idea that she wants to 'take those profits' from a lawful industry. The mere fact that she felt safe saying such a thing should chill sane people down to their very bones.
After all, if she can take it from them she can take it from anyone. And once that process starts (we're already long past that start, but you know what I mean) the end result is an utterly predictable foregone conclusion.
And it's never pretty.
L
I'm still laughing out loud at this one. I thought this post started off strong, then realized from the style who it was.
If all those quotes are from Ayn Rand (whom I've unfortunately never read), there should be a radio and a TV station both devoted 24 hours a day to broadcasting readings of her work. Fantastic stuff, and clear enough for even idiot Dems to understand (at least I'd like to think).
Thanks for the post #62. I never looked at money and the role it plays that way.