Francisco D'Anconia about money
So you think money is the root of evil? Have you ever thought about what is the root of money? Money is an exchange tool that can exist only if there are goods produced and people capable of producing them. Money is the material expression of the principle that people can interact through trade and pay value for value. Money is the argument of not beggars who beg for your goods with tears, or robbers who take it by force. Money is made only by those who produce. And you call that evil?
When you receive money in payment for your work, you do this in the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the labor of others. The price of the money give no beggars and robbers. Neither the ocean of tears, nor all the weapons in the world will turn the pieces of paper in your purse into the bread that you need to live until tomorrow. These pieces of paper, like gold, contain the energy of people producing value. Your wallet means hoping that there are people somewhere near you, not giving in to the moral principle that is the root of money. And you call that evil?
Have you tried to find the root of production? Look at the generator and try to convince yourself that it was created only by the muscular efforts of unreasonable animals. Try to grow wheat grain, not guided by the knowledge left to us by people who managed to achieve this for the first time. Try to get food without doing anything other than physical movement, and you will realize that the human mind is the root of all values ​​and all the wealth that existed on Earth.
')
But you claim that money is made strong at the expense of the weak? What strength are you talking about? It is not the power of a weapon or muscle. Wealth-product of human mental abilities. Is the money made by the person who created the engine made at the expense of those who did not create it? Are intellectuals money made by fools? Money capable - at the expense of the ignorant? Money ambitious - at the expense of the lazy? The money, before they could be stolen or begged, was made by the efforts of all honest people, each according to his abilities. An honest person is one who knows that he cannot consume more than he has produced.
Production and trading to get money - this is the password of honest people. Money is based on the axiom that every man is the master of his mind and his efforts. Money decided that only a conscious choice of the person who decided to sell you their efforts, evaluates their value. Money allows you to receive goods and labor, only because they have a price for people. Money allows only fair transactions for the sake of mutual benefit, without coercion, for augmentation, and not for sinking. In order to realize that people are not plodding cattle, doomed to drag their burden, you offer them values, not wounds, proving that connections between people are not an exchange of suffering, but an exchange of goods.
Money requires that you sell not your weakness for the need of human stupidity, but your talent for the needs of people. They demand that you buy not the low community that you are offered, but the best that money can give you. And when a person lives by trade, guided by the mind as the highest judge, and not by force, this is the best product, a person with the highest abilities. And the level of human productivity - the level of his reward. This is the meaning of existence, whose instrument and symbol is money. And you call that evil?
But money is just a tool. They will give you everything you want, but they will not replace you as a person walking towards your goal. They will give you the means to satisfy your desires today, but they will not generate new ones. Money punishes those people who are trying to reverse the law of causality - those who want to replace the mind with the products of the mind.
Money will not bring happiness to a person who has no idea what he wants. If he denies knowing what to value, if he avoids choosing what is valuable, money will not give him the laws of value determination. A fool does not buy intellect for money, a coward - courage, incompetent - respect. Anyone who, for money, is trying to buy the brains of those who are below him, putting money at the forefront, eventually becomes a victim of the inferior. Intellectuals avoid him, and fraudsters and deceivers cling to him, attracted by the law, which he cannot understand: nobody is allowed to be less than his money. For this reason you call them evil?
Only a person who does not need it can inherit wealth. A person who is able to make a fortune himself, no matter where he starts. If the heir is worthy of his money, they will serve him. If not, they will destroy it. And you scream that money corrupts him. Is it so? Or is he corrupting money? Do not envy a worthless heir, his wealth is not yours, and you would not get better by receiving it. Do not think that it should be distributed between you; to produce fifty parasites instead of one means to dissipate the state. Money is the life force that perishes without its roots. Money does not serve the mind that does not deserve them. For this reason you call them evil?
Money is your survival. The verdict that you make to the source of your livelihood, you endure your life. If the source is rotten, you damn your own life. Did you get your money fraudulently? Using human vices or human stupidity? Serving the fools, hoping to get more than your abilities allow you? Lowering your own standards? Performing a job that you despise? If so, your money will not bring you joy for a penny. Then all those things that you buy will not be to your advantage, but at a loss; will not be an achievement, but a source of shame. Then you scream that money is evil. Evil, because they destroy respect for you? Evil, because they do not let you enjoy your evil? Is this not the root of your hate for money?
Money always remains the result of your activity and refuse to take your place. Money is the product of virtue. But they do not create virtue in you and do not reduce your vices. Money will not bring you what you do not deserve - neither in the material sense, nor in the spiritual. Is this not the root of your hate for money?
Or do you say that the root of evil is the love of money? To love a thing is to know and love its essence. Loving money means knowing and loving the fact that money is the product of the best power in you and your permission to sell your efforts for the efforts of the best among people. He is the one who sold his soul for a penny, loudest proclaims his hatred of money, and he has a good reason for it. Those who love money want to work for them. They know they can earn them.
Let me give you the key to understanding the character of a person: a person cursing money received them dishonestly, he who respects money deserves it.
Run away from the person who will tell you that money is evil. This maxim, like the leper bell, warns us of the approach of the robber. As long as people on Earth live together, and they have reasons to interact, their only argument, if they are to reject money, will become a rifle barrel.
But, if you want to make or keep money, they will demand the highest virtues from you. People who do not have courage, pride or self-esteem, people who do not have the moral right to money and do not want to protect them, as they protect their lives, people who ask for forgiveness for being rich will not long remain rich. They are a real bait for the mob of marauders who crowd at the foot of the mountain and try to climb it at the first appearance of fear from a man who apologizes guiltily for having wealth. They will hasten to release him from this guilt, and at the same time from life, because he deserves it.
And then you will see how people of double standards will rise, those who live by the principle of strength, but count on those who live, creating money they rob, fellow travelers of virtue. In a moral society, they are criminals, and the laws are written in order to protect you from them. But when society creates “criminals by right” and “robbers by law” who use force to seize the money of defenseless victims, then money becomes the avenger of its creators. Such robbers are confident of their security. When they rob defenseless people, the law will not disarm them. But their prey becomes a magnet for other robbers who take it away. The race begins not among the best manufacturers, but among the most notorious thieves. When power becomes the main law, the murderer triumphs over the pocket thief. And then the society disappears in the darkness of the ruins and the carnage.
Do you want to know if this day is near? Watch out for the money. Money is a barometer of public virtue. When you see that trade is conducted not by agreement, but by coercion, when in order to produce, you must get permission from those people who do not produce anything, when money flows to businessmen not for goods, but for advantages, when you you see that people are getting richer for a bribe or by protection, not for work, and your laws do not protect you from them, but they from you, when corruption brings income, and honesty becomes self-sacrifice, know that your society is doomed. Money is a noble matter. What does not oppose weapons, does not oppose cruelty. They will not allow the country to survive in the form of semi-property, half-extraction.
Whenever destroyers appear among people, they begin with the destruction of money, because money is the protection of people and the basis of their moral existence. Destroyers take possession of gold, leaving it to the owners of a pile of discounted papers. They kill all objective standards and give people under the despotic power of those who arbitrarily establish values. Gold was material value, the equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage receipt for non-existent values, provided only by threats of reprisals against those who refuse to create. Paper is a check issued by legal robbers to an account that does not belong to them, to the virtue of victims. Wait, and the day will come when the check will be returned with the note "Your account has been exceeded."
By making evil a condition of survival, you cannot expect people to remain good. Do not expect them to remain moral and sacrifice their lives in order to become food for the immoral. Do not expect them to create when production is punished, and robbery is rewarded. Do not ask who destroyed this world. You destroyed it.
You are surrounded by the greatest achievements of the highest producing civilization, and you wonder why it crumbles to dust around you, if you curse its life and blood-money. You look over the money, as the savages did before you, and you wonder why the jungle are attacking your cities. Throughout the history of mankind, money has always been stolen by robbers of all kinds, their names have changed, but the method has remained the same: to seize wealth by force and keep producers bound, humiliated, inglorious, disenfranchised. This phrase of yours that money is an evil that you so ceremoniously and meaningfully pronounce came to us from the times when wealth was created by the hands of slaves who repeated movements that were once invented by someone’s mind and remained unchanged for centuries. When production is controlled by force, and wealth is gained by conquest, the opportunities for competition are minimal. And yet, through all the centuries of stagnation and famine, people lifted up the robbers, like sword aristocrats, native aristocrats, writing desk aristocrats, and despised manufacturers, slaves, shopkeepers and shopkeepers, manufacturers.
To the greatest glory of mankind, there is the first and only country in the history of money - and I don’t have a higher and more respectable tribute that I give to America: it is a country of reason, justice, freedom, production, achievements. For the first time, the human mind and money are freed, and there are no longer any fortunes gained by conquest, but there are only fortunes earned, and instead of Swordsmen and slaves a real wealth creator, the greatest worker, the highest type of person — the person who made himself — the American industrialist - appeared. If you ask me to name the most important distinguishing feature of Americans, I will say - and this determines everything else - that they are the people who gave the world the phrase “make money”. No other language or nation has ever used this phrase. People have always thought of wealth as a constant quantity, it was captured, begged, inherited, divided, robbed or received at the expense of advantages. Americans were the first to realize that wealth should be created. The words “make money” contain the essence of human morality.
And yet, for these words of Americans condemn the rotting cultures of the continents-robbers. Now the credo of robbers forces you to defend your highest achievements as a shameful stigma, your prosperity as guilt, your greatest people, industrialists as bastards, and your magnificent factories as a product and property of muscular labor, slave-driven slave labor, like those built the Egyptian pyramids. By this scoundrels who, with a self-satisfied smirk, declare that they do not see the difference between the power of the dollar and the power of the whip, you should try it out on your own skin. I think that will happen.
If you do not discover for yourself the truth that money is the root of all the good that is in the world, you will come to your own destruction. When money becomes an instrument of relations between people, a person will become an instrument of man. Choose: blood, whip and weapons or dollars, no other is given, and your time is running out ...
Ayn Rand. Atlas Shrugged
When you receive money in payment for your work, you do this in the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the labor of others. The price of the money give no beggars and robbers. Neither the ocean of tears, nor all the weapons in the world will turn the pieces of paper in your purse into the bread that you need to live until tomorrow. These pieces of paper, like gold, contain the energy of people producing value. Your wallet means hoping that there are people somewhere near you, not giving in to the moral principle that is the root of money. And you call that evil?
Have you tried to find the root of production? Look at the generator and try to convince yourself that it was created only by the muscular efforts of unreasonable animals. Try to grow wheat grain, not guided by the knowledge left to us by people who managed to achieve this for the first time. Try to get food without doing anything other than physical movement, and you will realize that the human mind is the root of all values ​​and all the wealth that existed on Earth.
')
But you claim that money is made strong at the expense of the weak? What strength are you talking about? It is not the power of a weapon or muscle. Wealth-product of human mental abilities. Is the money made by the person who created the engine made at the expense of those who did not create it? Are intellectuals money made by fools? Money capable - at the expense of the ignorant? Money ambitious - at the expense of the lazy? The money, before they could be stolen or begged, was made by the efforts of all honest people, each according to his abilities. An honest person is one who knows that he cannot consume more than he has produced.
Production and trading to get money - this is the password of honest people. Money is based on the axiom that every man is the master of his mind and his efforts. Money decided that only a conscious choice of the person who decided to sell you their efforts, evaluates their value. Money allows you to receive goods and labor, only because they have a price for people. Money allows only fair transactions for the sake of mutual benefit, without coercion, for augmentation, and not for sinking. In order to realize that people are not plodding cattle, doomed to drag their burden, you offer them values, not wounds, proving that connections between people are not an exchange of suffering, but an exchange of goods.
Money requires that you sell not your weakness for the need of human stupidity, but your talent for the needs of people. They demand that you buy not the low community that you are offered, but the best that money can give you. And when a person lives by trade, guided by the mind as the highest judge, and not by force, this is the best product, a person with the highest abilities. And the level of human productivity - the level of his reward. This is the meaning of existence, whose instrument and symbol is money. And you call that evil?
But money is just a tool. They will give you everything you want, but they will not replace you as a person walking towards your goal. They will give you the means to satisfy your desires today, but they will not generate new ones. Money punishes those people who are trying to reverse the law of causality - those who want to replace the mind with the products of the mind.
Money will not bring happiness to a person who has no idea what he wants. If he denies knowing what to value, if he avoids choosing what is valuable, money will not give him the laws of value determination. A fool does not buy intellect for money, a coward - courage, incompetent - respect. Anyone who, for money, is trying to buy the brains of those who are below him, putting money at the forefront, eventually becomes a victim of the inferior. Intellectuals avoid him, and fraudsters and deceivers cling to him, attracted by the law, which he cannot understand: nobody is allowed to be less than his money. For this reason you call them evil?
Only a person who does not need it can inherit wealth. A person who is able to make a fortune himself, no matter where he starts. If the heir is worthy of his money, they will serve him. If not, they will destroy it. And you scream that money corrupts him. Is it so? Or is he corrupting money? Do not envy a worthless heir, his wealth is not yours, and you would not get better by receiving it. Do not think that it should be distributed between you; to produce fifty parasites instead of one means to dissipate the state. Money is the life force that perishes without its roots. Money does not serve the mind that does not deserve them. For this reason you call them evil?
Money is your survival. The verdict that you make to the source of your livelihood, you endure your life. If the source is rotten, you damn your own life. Did you get your money fraudulently? Using human vices or human stupidity? Serving the fools, hoping to get more than your abilities allow you? Lowering your own standards? Performing a job that you despise? If so, your money will not bring you joy for a penny. Then all those things that you buy will not be to your advantage, but at a loss; will not be an achievement, but a source of shame. Then you scream that money is evil. Evil, because they destroy respect for you? Evil, because they do not let you enjoy your evil? Is this not the root of your hate for money?
Money always remains the result of your activity and refuse to take your place. Money is the product of virtue. But they do not create virtue in you and do not reduce your vices. Money will not bring you what you do not deserve - neither in the material sense, nor in the spiritual. Is this not the root of your hate for money?
Or do you say that the root of evil is the love of money? To love a thing is to know and love its essence. Loving money means knowing and loving the fact that money is the product of the best power in you and your permission to sell your efforts for the efforts of the best among people. He is the one who sold his soul for a penny, loudest proclaims his hatred of money, and he has a good reason for it. Those who love money want to work for them. They know they can earn them.
Let me give you the key to understanding the character of a person: a person cursing money received them dishonestly, he who respects money deserves it.
Run away from the person who will tell you that money is evil. This maxim, like the leper bell, warns us of the approach of the robber. As long as people on Earth live together, and they have reasons to interact, their only argument, if they are to reject money, will become a rifle barrel.
But, if you want to make or keep money, they will demand the highest virtues from you. People who do not have courage, pride or self-esteem, people who do not have the moral right to money and do not want to protect them, as they protect their lives, people who ask for forgiveness for being rich will not long remain rich. They are a real bait for the mob of marauders who crowd at the foot of the mountain and try to climb it at the first appearance of fear from a man who apologizes guiltily for having wealth. They will hasten to release him from this guilt, and at the same time from life, because he deserves it.
And then you will see how people of double standards will rise, those who live by the principle of strength, but count on those who live, creating money they rob, fellow travelers of virtue. In a moral society, they are criminals, and the laws are written in order to protect you from them. But when society creates “criminals by right” and “robbers by law” who use force to seize the money of defenseless victims, then money becomes the avenger of its creators. Such robbers are confident of their security. When they rob defenseless people, the law will not disarm them. But their prey becomes a magnet for other robbers who take it away. The race begins not among the best manufacturers, but among the most notorious thieves. When power becomes the main law, the murderer triumphs over the pocket thief. And then the society disappears in the darkness of the ruins and the carnage.
Do you want to know if this day is near? Watch out for the money. Money is a barometer of public virtue. When you see that trade is conducted not by agreement, but by coercion, when in order to produce, you must get permission from those people who do not produce anything, when money flows to businessmen not for goods, but for advantages, when you you see that people are getting richer for a bribe or by protection, not for work, and your laws do not protect you from them, but they from you, when corruption brings income, and honesty becomes self-sacrifice, know that your society is doomed. Money is a noble matter. What does not oppose weapons, does not oppose cruelty. They will not allow the country to survive in the form of semi-property, half-extraction.
Whenever destroyers appear among people, they begin with the destruction of money, because money is the protection of people and the basis of their moral existence. Destroyers take possession of gold, leaving it to the owners of a pile of discounted papers. They kill all objective standards and give people under the despotic power of those who arbitrarily establish values. Gold was material value, the equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage receipt for non-existent values, provided only by threats of reprisals against those who refuse to create. Paper is a check issued by legal robbers to an account that does not belong to them, to the virtue of victims. Wait, and the day will come when the check will be returned with the note "Your account has been exceeded."
By making evil a condition of survival, you cannot expect people to remain good. Do not expect them to remain moral and sacrifice their lives in order to become food for the immoral. Do not expect them to create when production is punished, and robbery is rewarded. Do not ask who destroyed this world. You destroyed it.
You are surrounded by the greatest achievements of the highest producing civilization, and you wonder why it crumbles to dust around you, if you curse its life and blood-money. You look over the money, as the savages did before you, and you wonder why the jungle are attacking your cities. Throughout the history of mankind, money has always been stolen by robbers of all kinds, their names have changed, but the method has remained the same: to seize wealth by force and keep producers bound, humiliated, inglorious, disenfranchised. This phrase of yours that money is an evil that you so ceremoniously and meaningfully pronounce came to us from the times when wealth was created by the hands of slaves who repeated movements that were once invented by someone’s mind and remained unchanged for centuries. When production is controlled by force, and wealth is gained by conquest, the opportunities for competition are minimal. And yet, through all the centuries of stagnation and famine, people lifted up the robbers, like sword aristocrats, native aristocrats, writing desk aristocrats, and despised manufacturers, slaves, shopkeepers and shopkeepers, manufacturers.
To the greatest glory of mankind, there is the first and only country in the history of money - and I don’t have a higher and more respectable tribute that I give to America: it is a country of reason, justice, freedom, production, achievements. For the first time, the human mind and money are freed, and there are no longer any fortunes gained by conquest, but there are only fortunes earned, and instead of Swordsmen and slaves a real wealth creator, the greatest worker, the highest type of person — the person who made himself — the American industrialist - appeared. If you ask me to name the most important distinguishing feature of Americans, I will say - and this determines everything else - that they are the people who gave the world the phrase “make money”. No other language or nation has ever used this phrase. People have always thought of wealth as a constant quantity, it was captured, begged, inherited, divided, robbed or received at the expense of advantages. Americans were the first to realize that wealth should be created. The words “make money” contain the essence of human morality.
And yet, for these words of Americans condemn the rotting cultures of the continents-robbers. Now the credo of robbers forces you to defend your highest achievements as a shameful stigma, your prosperity as guilt, your greatest people, industrialists as bastards, and your magnificent factories as a product and property of muscular labor, slave-driven slave labor, like those built the Egyptian pyramids. By this scoundrels who, with a self-satisfied smirk, declare that they do not see the difference between the power of the dollar and the power of the whip, you should try it out on your own skin. I think that will happen.
If you do not discover for yourself the truth that money is the root of all the good that is in the world, you will come to your own destruction. When money becomes an instrument of relations between people, a person will become an instrument of man. Choose: blood, whip and weapons or dollars, no other is given, and your time is running out ...
Ayn Rand. Atlas Shrugged
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/41892/
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