Is Money The Root Of All Evil?

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 brutes. Wealth is the product of our capacity to think. Is wealth created by the person who invents a motor, at the expense of those who did not? Is wealth created 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? Wealth must be created before it can be looted or mooched. It is made by the effort of every honest individual to the extent of their ability. Wealth is only accumulated, by producing more than what is consumed.

A truly free market permits you to obtain for your goods and your labour, that which they are worth to those who volunteer to buy them, but no more. There are no deals, except those to mutual benefit, by the unforced judgment of the traders. Money demands of you, the recognition that people must work for their own benefit, not for their own injury. The common bond among us is not the exchange of suffering, but the exchange of goods. Voluntary exchange necessitates that you sell, not your weakness to another'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 we live by trade - with reason, not force, as our final arbiter - it is the best product that wins. This is the code of existence whose tool, and symbol, is money. Is this what you consider evil?

Money will not purchase happiness for someone who has no concept of what they want. It 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 desire. Is this the reason why you call it evil?

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 us. It is the person, who would sell their soul for a nickel, who is the loudest in proclaiming a hatred of money - and they have 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 a person's character - the one who damns money has obtained it dishonourably; the person who respects it, has earned it.

Run for your life, from anyone who tells you, that money is evil. That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter. So long as we live together on earth, and need means to deal with one another - our only substitute, if we abandon trade, is the muzzle of a gun.

You may see a parasitism - those who live by force, yet count on others who live by trade, to create the value of their looted money. 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 - those who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims - then money becomes its creators' nemesis. Such looters believe it safe to rob the defenseless, 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 themselves 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 destroyer wins over the creator - 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 those who produce nothing - when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favours - when you see people getting richer, by graft and by pull, than by work, when you see corruption, being rewarded, and honesty, becoming a self-sacrifice - and your laws, don't protect you against criminals, but instead protect criminals, against you - then you may know, that your society is doomed.

Whenever destroyers appear among us, they start with the money. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners, a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards, and delivers us into 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.

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 lifeblood - 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 our history, money was always, seized by looters of one brand or another, but the method remained the same: to seize wealth by force, and to keep the producers bound, demeaned, defamed, and deprived of honour. That phrase about the evil of money, comes from a time, when wealth was produced through the labour of slaves - Production was ruled by force, and wealth was obtained by conquest. Through all those centuries of stagnation and starvation, history has exalted the looters, as aristocrats of the sword, as aristocrats of birth, as aristocrats of the bureau, and despised the producers, as slaves, traders, shopkeepers - and as industrialists.

To have a country of reason, justice, freedom, production and, achievement, both our mind and money, must be set free. No fortunes by conquest, but only fortunes by work. Instead of swordsmen and slaves, there appears the real maker of wealth, the greatest worker, the highest type of human being - the self-made individual.

Such a person believes in the phrase, 'to make money'. They do not think of wealth as being a static quantity to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted, or obtained as a favour. Wealth has to be created. The words 'to make money' hold the essence of human morality.