An Essay On Money - great read.

[topcash]

I just found this and enjoyed the read. Maybe you will too.
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from Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand....

"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. Not an ocean of tears not 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.'

"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 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 performance, the 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?

"Money is your means of survival. The verdict 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?

"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 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.

"Then you will see the rise of the 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 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 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.

"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, whose names changed, 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.

"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."



,

[littleroundman]

Ayn Rand (IPA: [ajn ***633;ænd], Ayn rhyming with mine; February 2 [O.S. January 20] 1905 – March 6, 1982),
born Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum (Russian: ***1040;***1083;***1080;***1089;***1072; ***1047;***1080;***1085;***1086;***1074;***1100;***1077;***1074;***1085;***1072; ***1056;***1086;***1079;***1077;***1085;***1073;***1072;***1091;***1084;), was a Russian-born American author best known for developing the ideology of Objectivism (which Rand considered to be a philosophy) and for writing the novels The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged, We the Living, and Anthem. A broadly influential figure in post-WWII America, her work attracted both fanatical admiration and scathing denunciations.

Rand's writing emphasizes the virtues of reason, individualism, rational egoism ("rational self-interest"), and laissez-faire capitalism, while attacking what she saw as the irrationallity and immorality of altruism, collectivism, and communism. She believed that people must choose their values and actions by reason; that the individual has a right to exist for his or her own sake, neither sacrificing self to others nor others to self; and that no one has the right to take what belongs to others by physical force or fraud, or impose their moral code on others by physical force. Her politics have been described as minarchism and libertarianism, though she never used the first term and detested the second.

The express goal of Rand's fiction was to showcase the idealized Randian hero, a man whose ability and independence causes conflict with society, but who nevertheless perseveres to achieve his goals.

[dogman]

More phlilosophical BS. Notice this says "product" There is no production in Dx.

[3Gx]

Looks intersted (EvilXMoney) :P , i will keep reading it (i finshed reading about 1/3)

[omegainvest]

Originally Posted by dogman

More phlilosophical BS. Notice this says "product" There is no production in Dx.

Interesting, I guess nothing is produced when I place an ad on adsxposed and it PRODUCES a customer who purchases something, But alas, you are one of the thickheaded old fools who probably don't see the services google offers as legit even though they produce profit for the webmasters and companies utilizing them, and I am sure you dont see what itunes sells as real goods being produced even though it provided apple with billions and soon trillions of dollars in revenue.

omega

[BobbyU]

[QUOTE=dogman]More phlilosophical BS. Notice this says "product" There is no production in Dx.[/QUOTE

DENSE DOG you take a beautiful quote and typical of the dog that you are (no offense meant to Sterna and the others) DUMP ALL OVER THIS THREAD!

I really can't believe that you haven't been institutionalized by now. Or locked up in the pound.

[dogman]

Originally Posted by DXGoddess

All the children who are subjected to cruelty, sexual assault, etc... attracted that sort of attention to them... right?

I personally have experienced TWO murders in my family... we attracted that too I suppose. I could go on about bad stuff that has been "attracted" to me, my family and friends... but I guess we were just getting what we deserved. Right?

There is evil in this world Bobby. And very few "attract" that sort of reality. Deal with that. It is how you DEAL with the evil, the unfortunate events, the fate of having a drunk driver coming at you or someone you love... No one can keep evil away or should I say "be the sole creator of their universe"... evil and negative $hit is everywhere - it happens and someday it will happen to you too. It is how one deals with it Bobby that separates the victims from the survivors.

You obviously have had no hardships or trials to deal with Bobby and I think you should consider yourself EXTREMELY lucky... not privileged, or special, or better... just very very lucky.


(The "broad generalization" you made pissed me off and I had to point out that you were oh so terribly wrong. Now with that said - YES... people who get involved with bad investment schemes are sometimes victims too, the elderly for example. But most are just not responsible enough to investigate - put in the recommended DD and tend to invest too much.)

[dogman]

[QUOTE=BobbyU]

Originally Posted by dogman

More phlilosophical BS. Notice this says "product" There is no production in Dx.[/QUOTE

DENSE DOG you take a beautiful quote and typical of the dog that you are (no offense meant to Sterna and the others) DUMP ALL OVER THIS THREAD!

I really can't believe that you haven't been institutionalized by now. Or locked up in the pound.

Beautiful - it has no bearing on Dx at all, and it is just like the rest of your posts about your own reality BS that DxGoddess dumped all over.

[topcash]

Originally Posted by dogman

Beautiful - it has no bearing on Dx at all, and it is just like the rest of your posts about your own reality BS that DxGoddess dumped all over.

I like how dxgooddess dumps all over the thread, but in that same thread she is talking about hardship and trials in her life.

And you think its just some "phlilosophical BS".

[BobbyU]

What is your point? More cut and paste to build your post count.

Dogman your worth is not measured in terms of how many posts you have, nor is it measured in how many times you cut and paste. It's measured in terms of your contribution to the discussion. Should I post a poll and ask others to vote on the relevance and thought behind your posts?

An interesting aside. An old friend of mine, a retired FBI agent, paid me a visit and I happened to show him information on DXinOne and on Talkgold. When your posts came up he made a comment that absolutely floored me. Something which I had never considered but I'm sure you can shed some light on. He said that your posts have the signature of a Law Enforcement plant that trys to provoke people in order to gain intelligence information on them. Part of his analasis was based the number of other threads you post on and on the nature of your responses. When I think about it that explains why you spend all of your time on Talkgold forums.

My take on the matter is that you really don't have the brains to be a plant or that you are far more canny than any of us gave you credit for. I will however give you a heads up. He is going to get your IP address and check your credentials because he is very currious.