"So you think money is the root of all evil?"

said Francisco d' Anconia. "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 prinicple that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of 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 tommorow. 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 the 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 mean of nothing but physical motions - and you'll learn that man's mind is the root of all goods produced and of all wealth that has ever existed on earth.

But you say that money is made by the strong at the expense of the weak? What strenght do you mean? It is not the strenght of guns or muscle. Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. Then is money made by a 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 the voluntary choice of the man who is willing to trade you his effort in return. Money premits 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 that 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 preformance, the man of best judgment and hightest ability - and the degree of a man's productiveness is the degree of his reward. The is the code of existance 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 a 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 brain of his superiors to serve him, with his money replacing his judgment, ends up 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 the money corrupted him. Did it? Or did he corrupt his money? Do not envy a worthless heir; his weath is not yours and you would have done no better with it. Do not think that is 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 the mind that cannot match it. Is this the reason why you call it evil?

Money is your means of survival. The verdict you pronounce upon the source of your livelihood is the verdict you have pronounced 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 penny's worth of joy. Then all the things you buy will become, not a tribue 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 nickle, who is 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 that 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 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 men 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 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 - the 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 wether that day is comming? Watch the 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 seen 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 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 moral existance. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into 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: 'Acount 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 you're 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 edges 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 that same: to seize wealth by force and 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, of 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 revernt tribute to pay 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 was 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 you own destruction. When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become tools of men. Blood, whips and guns - or dollars. Take your choice - there is no other - and your time is running out"

why then correct the cliche(money is...) to the King James' reading (the love of money is...)? I think it's not only fair but necessary to consider anything she has to say on a Biblical passage in light of her aggressive atheism. William F. Buckley recounted, in an obituary in NR, his meeting her and remembering her saying to him "you are too smart to believe in God." So your conclusion that I am intentionally obfuscating or ignorantly doing so is so much ill-tempered piffle.

William F. Buckley recounted, in an obituary in NR, his meeting her and remembering her saying to him "you are too smart to believe in God."

And so was C.S.Lewis! And Chesterton! And Tolkein! And Pascal!

So, where would Rand fit in on that list? He-hee.

his meeting her and remembering her saying to him "you are too smart to believe in God." So your conclusion that I am intentionally obfuscating or ignorantly doing so is so much ill-tempered piffle.

Well, I'm not above a good piffle or too, and my wife says I'm never grouchy, because I was born naturally ill-tempered, so you're probably at least partly right. However, you are wrong about Ayn Rand's intent in the quoted passage. She was not answering a Bible passage, but the words of characters in her story. If you want to make the case the those characters were quoting the Bible, you know more about what fictional characters think than I do.

Ayn Rand rejected the Bible and Christianity because she suppose that those who call themselves Christians and claim to beleive the Bible would know what it teaches. In this she was very wrong, and rejected Christianity on the basis of what Christians teach, not what the Bible teaches. If I thought the Bible taught what most Christians falsley believe, I would reject the Bible too.

Hank

" For ye see your calling, brethren, how that not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called. But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise.....That no flesh should glory in His presence."( I Cor.1:26,27a,29)

But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise.....That no flesh should glory in His presence.

The worldly wise reject the teaching of Ayn Rand and the Bible, both. Do you think there is a contradiction between the money speech and the Bible?

Hank

I think Jesus probably demonstrated the principle involved when He chalenged the rich young ruler. The RYRuler asked Jesus what he must do for eternal life and Jesus named some commandments. The RYR said he had kept them from his youth( probably a lie). Then Jesus said (because He knew his heart), sell all your goods and give the money to the poor. Jesus knew the money was more important to him than eternal life. It was his love of money that destroyed him. Money is a tool, nothing more nothing less. If money becomes your god, then God will either remove it to destroy you, or give you more, that you may destroy yourself. Either way, God is a jealous God.

When the Anti-Christ is revealed, people will be asked to take his mark. Those that don't will be killed, those that do will be spared. We are offered his mark every day, even now, we just haven't realized it yet. We must evaluate who or what our gods are every day. THis is the best explaination of the passage where Jesus tells us we must hate our children, mother/father, husband/wife, etc. If we love anything or anybody more than Him, He will repay. Many are called, few are chosen.

I was first drawn to Ayn Rand as an anti-communist, so certainly there has to be some common-ground, even if only recognizing a common enemy. Sort of what very disparate Freepers have found since Clinton's gone (almost). There's a whole lot more to disagree about.

Here, I'll say it for all the Bible-thumpers who will only read the title and then hit the reply button, postively panting with delight at the thought of correcting someone (like nmh, who always engages "reply" a bit too soon.):

"No, Orion, the CORRECT Biblical quote is 'the LOVE of money is the root of all evil...' obviously Ayn Rand didn't know that... ooops, now that I've read the actual text I see that she knew full well what the Bible says... okay, never mind... but she WAS just an atheist you know, and only Jeeeezus will save you now!" There, how was that?

Chiliasm is one of the false teachings of Christianity that makes it odious to the world. These interpretations of the Bible invented by men are always dangerous and seductive, and many are deceived thereby.

What do you make of this passage?

John 5:28,29 Marvel not at this: for the hour is coming, in the which all that are in the graves shall hear his voice, And shall come forth; they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation.

Hank

Thanks for the Ping CG, the speach by Hank Reardon is one of the best I ever read. Atlas Shrugged is a masaterpiece. I feel sorry for those who can't look past Rand's atheism. I look past it. Take the good stuff (very good stuff) leave the bad. I believe it is called critical thinking.

OK ayotallah's (you know who you are), flame away. I'm going to bed in asbestos underwear.....for a change.

P.S. CG the second paragraph has nothing to do with you, bud.

Later, W.

OK ayotallah's (you know who you are), flame away. I'm going to bed in asbestos underwear.....for a change.

P.S. CG the second paragraph has nothing to do with you, bud.

Later, W.

Too much scotch...dagnabit..but what do you expect from someone as evil as to have read Rand...(/sarcasm)

It's the Scotch that's the problem, not the quantity. Rand was partial to CC, but bourbon is the solution.

Hank

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