THE ROCHE RECORD – MONEY AS THE ROOT OF ALL GOOD


Frank Roche
March 27, 2011

‘MONEY AS THE ROOT OF ALL GOOD’
These words are excerpted from a book of fiction written in the 1950’s by a woman who came to America having freed herself from the grip of Communism in the Soviet Union.  While likley uncomfortably phrased for some, the economic implications are real and relevant today nonetheless.

Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, Copyright 1957, pages 410-415.

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 by the looters, who take it from you by force.  Money is made possible only by the men who produce.

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 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 piece of paper…are a token 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.  

Take a look at an electric generator and dare tell your-self 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.

Wealth is the product of man’s capacity to think.

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 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 the desires.  Money is 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 buy intelligence for the fool, or admiration for the coward, or respect for the incompetent.

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 their soul for a nickel, who is loudest in proclaiming his hatred of money-and he has reason to hate it.  The lovers of money are willing to work for it.  They know they are able to deserve 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.

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 from 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…will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot.

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, mans 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 others-the fact that they were the people who created the phrase “to make money.”  …men thought of wealth as a static quantity-to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted, or obtained as favor.  Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created.

Now the looters’ credo has brought you to regard your proudest achievement 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…

Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction.

These words are excerpted from a book of fiction written in the 1950’s by a woman who came to America having freed herself from the grip of Communism in the Soviet Union.  While likley uncomfortably phrased for some, the economic implications are real and relevant today nonetheless.

Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, Copyright 1957, pages 410-415.

Share

Leave a Reply

Search All Posts
Categories