Haven't re-read Atlas Shrugged in a while now. But I have picked it up and went straight to page 308 to read the money speech now and again. In essence what she says about money is not an exaggeration, far from it, but there are a lot of things in there that I don't agree with. Just wanted to share it here:
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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'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 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 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 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."
