Let's hear it right from Miss Rand, shall we? A page and a
half from Atlas Shrugged:
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'Aconia. "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.
You are completely incorrect above and contradict yourself !
