So you think money is the root of all evil?  Have any of you 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 those that produce.
Is this what some consider evil?

When you accept money in payment for your efforts, 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 Looters who give value to money. Not an ocean of tears nor all the guns in the world can transform those peaces of paper in you 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 that 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. Perhaps this is exactly what some consider evil?

Have you ever looked for the root of production? Take a look at an electric generator or a computer 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 discovered 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 goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth.

But some 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 a product of man’s capacity to think. Then is money made by the man who invented a motor at the expense of those that did not invent it? Is money made by intelligent at the expense of the fools? By the able at the expense by the incompetent? By the ambitious at the expense of the lazy? 

Money is made- before it can be looted or mooched- it is made by the efforts 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 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 efforts. Money allows no power to prescribe the value of your effort except the voluntary choice of a man who is willing to trade you his effort in return. Money permits you to obtain for your goods and your labour that which they are worth to the men that buy them, but no more. Money permits no deals except those to mutual benefit by the unforced judgment of the traders. Money demand 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 they are not beasts of burden, born to carry the wait of your misery-that you must offer them values, not wounds-that the common bonds amongst men is not the exchange of suffering, but the exchange of goods.

Money demands you sell, not weakness to man’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 and reason, not force, as their final arbiter- it is the best product that wins, the best performance, the man of best judgment and highest ability-and a degree of a mans productiveness is the degree of his reward. This is the code of existence whose tools and symbol is money. Is it this some consider evil?

But money is only a tool. It will take you where ever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver. It will give you the means of satisfaction of your desires, but it will not provide you with desires. Money is the scourge of men who attempt to reserve the law of casualty- the men who seek to replace the mind by seizing the products of the mind and Ideas to produce.

Money will not provide happiness for the man who has no concept of what he wants: money will not give him a code of values, if he evades the knowledge of what to value, and it will not provide him with a purpose, if he evades the choice of what to seek. Money will not buy intelligence for a fool, or admiration for 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, end 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 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 cry that money corrupts him. Did it? Or did he corrupt his money? Do you envy a worthless heir; his wealth is not yours and you would do no better with it. Do not think it should have been distributed among you; loading the world with 50 parasites instead of one, would not bring back the dead virtue which was the fortune. Money is a living power that dies without its roots. Money can not serve the mind that can not match it. Is this the reason you call it evil?
Money is your means of survival. The verdict you pronounce upon your livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon your life. If the source is corrupt, you have dammed 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 purchases of your scorn? If so, then your money will not give you a moments or a cents 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 will scream that money is evil. Evil, because it will not pinch-hit for your self respect?  Evil because it will not let you enjoy your own depravity.  Is this the root cause of your hatred of money?

Or did you say and think 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 a creation of the best power within you, and your key pass to trade your effort for the effort of the best amongst men. It’s the person who would sell his soul for a cent, 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 they are able to deserve it.

Let me give you a clue to man’s character: The man who damns money has obtained it dishonourably; a man who respects it has earned it. Run for your life if any man tells you 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 abandoned 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 natural bait for swarms of looters that 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 his guilt-and his life, as he so deserves.

Then you will see the rise of men of double standards-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 hitchhikers of virtue. In a normal 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 creator’s avenger.

Such looters believe it safer to rob defenceless men, once they have 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 those ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter.

Do you wish to know when the day is coming? Then watch money. Money is a barometer of society’s virtue. When you see trading 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 that deal, not in goods, but in favours-when you see 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 of half property and half loot.
Note:

See and read Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. Where do you think we are in the scale of the new found knowledge?

Ayn Rand is an excellent phiosopher on all matters monetary and economic. Her portrayals of her villains is pot on. But, do you ever get the desire to punch one of her heros on the nose, and explain that most of us don’t fall in love with railways and skyscrpaers she so reverently and, there’s no other word for it, lovingly describes?

Alex,

I was once impressed by Rand when I was about 14.

Rand is rubbish. She is a sixth rate writer, to put it mildly. And her so-called “objectivism” philosophy has the trappings of a bizarre cult. Except that this is supposedly a “cult of reason”.

But on a more serious note, if one really wishes to understand the order of things in our time, the Philosopher to read is Montesquieu. The Spirit of Laws is our starting point in this exercise. But perhaps a good reading of John Locke before a reading of Montesquieu is also in order.

After reading JJR’s Dissecting leftism some time ago, and after reading Atlas Shrugged, things sort of fitted into place. The story in part sounded exactly what is happening today. Yeh, I think I could only worship a sky scraper if it was my Parachute jump site for lefties, other than that hmmm. The train part is coincidental , my old man worked at the railways, so we were privileged as kids to travel in the locomotive with the driver on every school holiday, Lucky I suppose and My brother in Law is a chief Officer in the merchant Navy, not quit lucky to go for a ride, but have access to the ship and check it all out when he comes in to Sydney.
I had a crush on Sandy Shaw when I was about 5 Phil, I think the song was Puppet on a String, ha. T V was a novelty peace of furniture back then.eee Getting old.

Phil,

As I said, whilst I like her critique of the Looters, I generally find her heroes no more sympathetic than her villains. And her Objectvism is purely tautological: she essentially says, reality and the world exist because I say they do.

Still, she does provide a secular account of semi-traditional morality, and many of her flaws are inconsistencies, e.g. if she was serious about contract, she’d be against divorce. I wonder if a consistent Objectivist would be any better, from a conservative pov.

Alex,

The man whose picture is your “avatar” - now there was an erudite man. He mastered 11 languages before his death.

So you think money is the root of all evil?

It is not the “root” of evil, but it may well be regarded as an evil.  Ms. Rosenbaum tells only half the story.  Money does indeed facilitate exchange and, at least in the short term, the creation of wealth.  At the same time, however, it facilitates the concentration (or centralization) of wealth and power that is fatal to a human community.

How about, “The *love* of money is the root of all evil”?  I like that one better.  It’s close enough to the truth for most people, and that’s what makes a really good aphorism.