atlas shrugged

A particularly poignant excerpt from Atlas Shrugged as it relates to our current situation -- note the honorable mention given to gold: “So you think that money is the root of all evil?” “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 not 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 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 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? “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 the mind that cannot match it. Is this the reason why you call it evil? “Money is your means of survival. The verdict 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 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 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. “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 is 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 bounces, 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, whose names changed, 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." dharma

few read rand. even fewer understand her. the whole ball of wax is in the above paragraphs.
here is rogers take
http://www.cnbc.com/id/47767459
dharma

pssss, let me give you the real secret about money - - it's the only thing the govt accepts for paying your taxes. All the gold, donkeys or brides you may offer at the govt payment window will NOT keep you out of jail or the funny farm if you don't pay your taxes in the govt's currency. If your mind is truly opened, this little fact should give you more enlightenment than 500 pages of Rand. Try not to think about all that wasted reading time. Rogers is a broken clock.

Edited by salsabob, 12 June 2012 - 11:00 AM.

pssss, let me give you the real secret about money -

- it's the only thing the govt accepts for paying your taxes.

All the gold, donkeys or brides you may offer at the govt payment window will NOT keep you out of jail or the funny farm if you don't pay your taxes in the govt's currency.

If your mind is truly opened, this little fact should give you more enlightenment than 500 pages of Rand. Try not to think about all that wasted reading time.

Rogers is a broken clock.

perfect

dharma

pssss, let me give you the real secret about money -

- it's the only thing the govt accepts for paying your taxes.

All the gold, donkeys or brides you may offer at the govt payment window will NOT keep you out of jail or the funny farm if you don't pay your taxes in the govt's currency.

If your mind is truly opened, this little fact should give you more enlightenment than 500 pages of Rand. Try not to think about all that wasted reading time.

Rogers is a broken clock.

perfect

dharma

If you doubt me, try the experiment. Tip - just have your lawyer prep'd to receive your 1 phone call.

Also, we don't "make money," we earn it. If you're making it, then I have to report you to the FBI.
If Jim Rogers had understood this holds true of ALL govt securities, whether dollars or T-bills, then he may have only lost half of all the money he did last year.

I realize that this pragmatic advice doesn't give you Rand's magic ponies that poop gold nuggets, but it is infinitely more objective.

Co-dependance is a sickness, but it makes you feel superior.

As for Rand, she had learned from the tyranny and failures of collectivism in Russia, which some still try to force on the rest of us, resulting in the current failure of the world's economies.

You too can learn from the economic principles of the past successes:

The True Story of Thanksgiving
-- The story of the Pilgrims begins in the early part of the seventeenth century ...
The Church of England under King James I was persecuting anyone and everyone who did not recognize its absolute civil and spiritual authority. Those who challenged ecclesiastical authority and those who believed strongly in freedom of worship were hunted down, imprisoned, and sometimes executed for their beliefs." In England.

So, "A group of separatists first fled to Holland and established a community. After eleven years, about forty of them agreed to make a perilous journey to the New World, where they would certainly face hardships, but could live and worship G0D according to the dictates of their own consciences. On August 1, 1620, the Mayflower set sail. It carried a total of 102 passengers, including forty Pilgrims led by William Bradford. On the journey, Bradford set up an agreement, a contract, that established just and equal laws for all members of the new community, irrespective of their religious beliefs. The journey to the New World was a long and arduous one. And when the Pilgrims landed in New England in November, they found -- according to Bradford's detailed journal -- a cold, barren, desolate wilderness."
"There were no friends to greet them, he wrote." "There were no houses to shelter them. There were no inns where they could refresh themselves. And the sacrifice they had made for freedom was just beginning. During the first winter, half the Pilgrims -- including Bradford's own wife -- died of either starvation, sickness or exposure. When spring finally came, Indians taught the settlers how to plant corn, fish for cod and skin beavers for coats.

"Life improved for the Pilgrims, but they did not yet prosper! This is important to understand because this is where modern American history lessons often end. Here is the part that has been omitted: The original contract the Pilgrims had entered into with their merchant-sponsors in London called for everything they produced to go into a common store, and each member of the community was entitled to one common share. All of the land they cleared and the houses they built belonged to the community as well." Everything belonged to everybody. "They were going to distribute it equally. All of the land they cleared and the houses they built belonged to the community as well.

"Nobody owned anything." "They just had a share in it," but nobody owned anything. The original pilgrim settlement was a commune."
"And what happened? It didn't work!" They nearly starved!
"It never has worked! What Bradford and his community found was that the most creative and industrious people had no incentive to work any harder than anyone else, unless they could utilize the power of personal motivation; self-interest! But while most of the rest of the world has been experimenting with socialism for well over a hundred years -- trying to refine it, perfect it, and re-invent it -- the Pilgrims decided early on to scrap it permanently.
What Bradford wrote about this social experiment should be in every schoolchild's history lesson.
If it were, we might prevent much needless suffering in the future." If it were, there wouldn't be any Occupy Wall Street. There wouldn't be any romance for it.

"The experience that we had in this common course and condition,'" Bradford wrote. "'The experience that we had in this common course and condition tried sundry years...that by taking away property, and bringing community into a common wealth, would make them happy and flourishing -- as if they were wiser than G0D,' Bradford wrote." This was his way of saying, it didn't work, we thought we were smarter than everybody, everybody was gonna share equally, nobody was gonna have anything more than anything else, it was gonna be hunky-dory, kumbaya. Except it doesn't work. Because of half of them didn't work, maybe more. They depended on the others to do all the work. There was no incentive.

"'For this community [so far as it was] was found to breed much confusion and discontent, and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort. For young men that were most able and fit for labor and service did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men's wives and children without any recompense,'" without being paid for it, "'that was thought injustice.'" They figured it out real quick. Half the community is not working -- living off the other half, that is. Resentment built. Why should you work for other people when you can't work for yourself? that's what he was saying.
So the Pilgrims found that people could not be expected to do their best work without incentive. So what did Bradford's community try next? They unharnessed the power of self-interest, good old free enterprise by invoking the under-girding capitalistic principle of private property.
"Bradford, who had become the new governor of the colony, recognized that
this form of collectivism was as costly and destructive to the Pilgrims as that first harsh winter,
which had taken so many lives. He decided to take bold action.
Bradford assigned a plot of land to each family to work and manage," as they saw fit, and, "thus turning loose the power of the marketplace.

"Every family was assigned its own plot of land to work and permitted to market its own crops and products.
And what was the result? 'This had very good success,'
wrote Bradford, 'for it made all hands industrious, so as[b] much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been.' ... Is it possible that supply-side economics could have existed before the 1980s? Yes," it did. "Now, this is where it gets really good, folks, if you're laboring under the misconception that I was, as I was taught in school. So they set up trading posts and exchanged goods with the Indians." This is what happened. After everybody had their own plot of land and were allowed to market it and develop it as they saw fit and got to keep what they produced, bounty, plenty resulted.

"And then they set up trading posts, stores. They exchanged goods with and sold the Indians things. Good old-fashioned commerce. They sold stuff. There were profits, and, "The profits allowed them to pay off their debts to the merchants in London." They paid off the merchant sponsors back in London with their profits, they were selling goods and services to the Indians. "The success and prosperity of the Plymouth settlement attracted more Europeans," what was barren was now productive, "and began what came to be known as the 'Great Puritan Migration.'

Edited by Rogerdodger, 13 June 2012 - 09:28 AM.

Now back to Rand's observation.
When Bradford's New England settlers "sold stuff" they were actually selling bits and pieces of their lives, their efforts, their ingenuity.
At the moment of birth, we have nothing to offer other humans but our smiles.
But as we become older, we can begin to do "chores" or labor by which we first begin to support ourselves, and eventually, thru industrious self interest, we usually have a surplus of our production.
Other people may be able to produce things which we need or want and we "trade" our labor and ability for their labor and ability.
We have surplus corn which we chose to grow rather than simply resting, they trade with us for their surplus wheat which they produced rather than just resting.
At times we may not need their surplus wheat but they need our corn so they write us a "note" good for future payment of their surplus.

This "note" of labor is the "evil" money which Rand speaks of, observing:
"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 made possible only by the men who produce."

The EVIL is actually the greedy "LOVE OF MONEY" exhibited by Rand's "Moochers" and "Looters"
who are unwilling to trade their labor in a free market but rather immorally take without payment, usually at the barrel of a government gun by their "elected" government Looter (Sheriff of Nottingham).
Thus she continues: "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."

Looters and Moochers hate such free trade between agreeing parties and have attempted to eliminate all "notes" or currency except the currency which they produce, control and multiply AT WILL.
Thus they can borrow your one day of labor, inflate the currency (simply PRINT one day of labor) and in the future, pay you back with much less real value.

Thus in the late 1960's when I began offering my labor to a local restaurant as a dishwasher, I was paid the equivalent of 1 oz of GOLD per week, which was the equivalent of $0.90 an hour!
Today, unless you can find a (non-union) dishwasher who makes $78,000 a year ( 52 x 1 ounce gold at $1,500 vs $36 in 1960's) the Looters pay back dishwashers 1/4 of that thru the devaluation and inflation of the Dollar.

A great scheme of de facto theft at the hands of the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve.
Now they would like to see just ONE CURRENCY for the whole world, to the detriment of all who labor and expect an equal and just reward for it.
Gold is their problem.
And Rand is hated for exposing them so masterfully.

Edited by Rogerdodger, 13 June 2012 - 09:47 AM.

Co-dependance is a sickness,

Perhaps, but living in magic pony land is not only a sickness, it tends to loss you a lot of money - mostly to people like me. I very much enjoyed taking a lot of Rogers' money on his bond and currency calls based on his silly assumptions about what money is.

The closet any large group of people have come to Rand's vision was on the outskirts of Mogadishu (see "Blackhawk Down"), and even there you had to pay "the govt" exactly in the currency that they wanted - they were called warlords which might confuse some Randians because they didn't bother with throwing you in jail or funny farm for not paying your taxes; they just killed you.

I know it makes you all's heads explode to tell you this, but money is a creation of the state. Understand that, and you will not only be far less confused by what goes on around you but you will more likely profit from it.