Is Money the Root of all that is Evil?

What's So Evil About Money?

This post began as a friendly debate between SuperMixxers FatLester and FAFAF over whether money should be viewed as a virtue or a vice. The discussion included some excerpts from Francisco d'Anconia's speech on money from Ayn Rand's novel "Atlas Shrugged", as well as some discussion regarding the relationship between money and power.

* FAFAF
* added about 1 hour ago

I do not see it that way.This is how I see it.
Money leads to Wealth.
Wealth leads to Absolute power.
Absolute power leads to Corruption.
You know what they say:
Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutily.
How much money would you have to have?
To be able to say that you have enough Money?
Clarence

* FatLester
* added less than a minute ago

@FAFAF

Your logic is flawed. Your premises do not follow one-another, and your conclusion is thus rendered invalid and irrelevant because your founding premises are based upon the "slippery slope" fallacy.

How much money is enough? That amount cannot be attained as governments keep seizing everyone's wealth through the printing of more money and subsequent dilution of the currency. Money isn't the problem, and neither or those who make it --- even large amounts of it.

Wealth does not lead to absolute power. Absolute power can only be achieved when all wealth is destroyed, and the individual must rely on a government for his basic living necessities. Money is the tool that PREVENTS absolute power.

Where is there absolute power in the world? Zimbabwe? Venezuela? Both poverty-stricken countries whose people had no money to prevent murderous dictators from seizing power.

When there is no money, there is far less education. When consecutive generations are blissfully ignorant, socialists like Hugo Chavez tend to rise up and convince the masses that the answer to their problems is a bigger government, which further hinders those actually doing something to bring wealth to the region due to excessive tax increases for the lucky, outright government takeovers for the unlucky.

Money is the very tool which prevents dictators like Hugo Chavez from gaining power.

It is a miracle that there are enough wealthy people in Honduras to have enough influence to effectively depose of a would-be dictator whose puppet-master was none other than Hugo himself.

No Clarence, as Francisco d'Anconia says:

"Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?"

"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?"

"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 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."

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