Money: The root of all evil?

It is said that money is the root of all evil. But that is false. Rather it was the love of money that Jesus Christ called “the root of all evil”. Money is merely a tool of exchange. Money is something that men use to deal with one another in trade. It is used to give and receive value.

What is the root of money? Money can’t exist unless there are goods and services produced by men. So money is not a tool of moochers or slothful, lazy men who do not produce anything, who are parasites on society, and who beg your product from you by their tears of need. Neither is money the tool of looters who would take from you by force. Not an ocean of bleeding heart tears nor all the armies in the world would give an ounce of value to money. Rather money is the tool of men who produce something and wish to exchange it for something of like value. Would you call that evil?

Money gets its value from the belief that when you accept money in exchange for your efforts, then you will be able to exchange it for the valuable product of the effort of other men. It is based upon a faith in mankind, that out there somewhere are other men who produce goods and services, and who will not default on the moral contract that money represents. Your money is a claim upon the energy and effort of other men who produce. Is that evil?

What is the root of production? It is man’s mind. It is man’s ability to use his intellect to master his environment. Every product, whether it be an electric generator or how to cultivate wheat, was left to us by the man who discovered it, or invented it for the very first time. The knowledge, innovation, the trial and error, of generations past are handed down to us as the means of production. And each generation improves upon it, expands our knowledge, experiments, innovates, modifies, discovers, invents, and the means of production are constantly improved. Would you call that evil?

Some say that money is made by the strong at the expense of the weak. But it is not by strength of arms or military might by which money is made. It is the product of man’s ability to think. What strength do they refer to? Do they mean the strength of the intelligent at the expense of the foolish? Do they mean the strength of the able at the expense of the incompetent? Do they mean the strength of the industrious at the expense of the lazy and slothful? Do the mean the strength of the educated over the ignorant? Do they mean the strength of those who persevere and diligently continue when all around them are calling it impossible? Do they mean the strength of the man who invents something new over the man who did not invent it? Looters and moochers do not create wealth, for nothing can be mooched or looted until it is first exists. Wealth is earned by an honest man who uses the strength of his mind to do what others will not do or are incapable of doing. Money is made by men who use their abilities to produce. The honest man knows that he cannot consume more than he produces. He is neither a moocher or a looter, but he is a producer. Is that evil?

To trade by means of money is a code of peaceful conduct by men of goodwill. Money rests on the axiom that each man is the owner of his own mind and his own ability. Money is absolutely democratic. Each man has the voluntary choice to trade his effort for the effort of another man. No power can set the value of your effort, except for another man who is willing to trade his effort for yours. Money permits you to obtain for your efforts whatever they are worth to the man who buys them, no more, no less. Money permits no deal except to the mutual benefit of the two unforced traders. Either can decline the trade. Both can negotiate for higher value. Both can seek other buyers and other sellers. Trade by money demands that no man can work for his own detriment but only for his own benefit, not for his loss but for his gain, for his betterment not for his injury. Money rests on the acceptance that men are not beasts of burden, not slaves, made to carry your misery, that men must be offered value not wounds, that men exchange products and services, and do not exchange suffering for their efforts. Is this evil?

To trade by money improves the quality of life. Trade by money demands that men do not sell their ignorance to your stupidity, but rather their talent to your reason. You do not buy the shoddiest men offer, but rather are free to seek out the best that your money can buy. Among free men, it is the best product that is in demand. The highest rewards go to the best performance, the man of best judgment and highest ability. The degree of a man’s productivity is the degree of his reward. Is this evil?

Money is just a tool, a means of trade. Man is still the driver. States of character are not altered by wealth. Money cannot buy lasting happiness for the man of vice. Money is a means of satisfying your desires, but you still supply the desires. Money cannot teach a man what to value, who has a perverted value system. Money cannot buy intelligence for a fool, honor for a coward, ability for the incompetent. Money does not solve a flawed state of character. Is this why it is called evil?

As to inherited wealth, or undeserved fortune, the fool and his money are soon parted. The benefactor who created the wealth can pass on his money but he cannot always pass on those virtues that led to the creation of the wealth. The second generation, raised with privilege and comfort, may lack the industry of their ancestor. The inferior heir who attempts to purchase the brains of his superiors, but lacks judgment, will soon be surrounded by cheats and swindlers. Unless bound to him by loyalty to his ancestor, men of true intelligence will desert him. No man is smaller than his money. Only a man who does not need wealth is fit to inherit wealth. A capable, intelligent, competent heir would have acquired his own money. He will not be destroyed by his inheritance, but his money will serve him. Money does not corrupt a man of virtue, but a man of vice will use money in corrupt ways. The worthless heir is not to be pitied or envied. His money was not yours. If he gave it away, he would only have created a group of parasitic moochers, rather than only one such ignoble creature. Money does not serve a mind that cannot manage it. Is this why it is called evil?

Money is a means of survival. Life is given to man but survival is not. A body is given to man but sustenance is not. A mind is given to man but what man puts in it is not. To remain alive man must act. And to act he must have a goal and the ways and mean to achieve the goal. To live man must think. So the mind is the basic tool for survival. The mind is the means of acquiring money. To think is an act of choice. Man is a being of volitional consciousness. Reason does not work automatically. Thinking is not a mechanical process. Logic is not instinctive. Your heart, your lungs, your stomach, they operate automatically. Your mind does not. You are free to think or to evade that effort. To be or not to be, is the same as to think or not to think. The fundamental choice for man is existence or death. But man, unlike animals and plants, has no instinct for survival, man has no automatic code for survival. The desire to survive is not the same as having the knowledge required to survive. To survive, man must obtain the knowledge of how to survive. Man must exercise his free will to take action. He must choose the ways and means of his survival. Man is not rational by nature but rather by choice. Only by using his mind to master his environment does man survive. In our society, man survives by using his mind to acquire the knowledge of how to make money.

What rational being would call the means of its survival evil? What sort of moral code would denounce life? This is really a code of death. A moral code that teaches you to become a sacrificial animal seeking slaughter on the altar of others is a code of death. A man who seeks to oppose, contradict and negate the means of his own survival is a metaphysical monstrosity, on the trail of his own destruction. Man can choose death over life, but if he chooses to exist, then he must choose a course of action that achieves survival. Any other course of action will destroy his life and his happiness.
You need money to live. So if money is evil, then you are calling life evil. Why would a man call his life evil? How did a man get his money? Was it by looting, by parasitic mooching, by fraud, by pandering to men’s vices, by taking advantage of fools, by relying on the stupidity of men to get more than his efforts were worth, by lowering his standards, or was it by doing work he despises for purchasers he scorns? If a man got his money in a manner the lacks virtue and honor, no wonder he calls money evil. No wonder he cannot enjoy a penny of his money. For he cannot trade his money for the virtue he lacks. The money cannot repurchase his self-respect. Money will not allow a man to enjoy his depravity. So if a man calls money evil, beware of that man. He has obtained his survival by dishonorable means.

Man survives by using his mind, by being rational, by acquiring knowledge of how to survive. Since Money is the means of survival, then calling money evil, is really calling rationality evil. It is calling Man’s mind and his ability to acquire knowledge evil.

Money is the effect, but man is the cause. Money is the natural product of the virtues listed above, notably of industry, but it will not give a man virtue, and it will not redeem his vices.

To understand money, to know its nature and its purpose, is to realize that money is the avenue to peaceful trade with the best and brightest among men. The person who would sell his soul for a nickel is the person who would call money evil. The man who respects money is proud of the manner in which he earned it. Realize that so long as men need a ways and means to trade with one another, then the only substitute for money is the muzzle of a gun. If you cannot trade your efforts, your services, your products, for mine, then the only way you can acquire the result of my efforts is to take them by force.

If you wish to acquire and keep wealth, then you must be a man of virtue. Men who lack courage, pride, self-esteem, have no moral sense of their right to the money they earn. They are not willing to defend their wealth as they would defend their life. Some even apologize for their wealth and they will not keep it long. For the swarms of looters and moochers will crawl out from under their rocks at the first smell of a man who apologizes for his wealth. The man who begs to be forgiven for his success, the looters and moochers will hasten to relieve him of the cause of his guilt. Like the TV evangelist who preached, “If your money bothers you, send it to me.” They will take his money and his life, and he deserves no better treatment.

Then emerges a class of wealthy people, looters of wealth, who use law to disarm their victims. They are leeches on society, hitchhikers who depend upon men of virtue to produce wealth, in order that they may loot it. In a moral society, laws are written to protect men of virtue from criminals. But when a society establishes looters-by-law and moochers-by-right, then you know that the tide has turned. When criminals use the law to loot their unarmed victims, then will arise a class of looters, each more savage and vicious than those before him. Then wealth goes not to ablest or most productive but to the most brutal and ruthless. The pickpocket gives way to the murderer. The creed of unearned rewards and unrewarded duties has taken over. When you see trade being done by order of law rather than by free choice, when you see production done not by consent but by compulsion, when you see that permission to produce needs to be obtained from men who produce nothing, when you see money flowing to those who deal in favors rather than in production, when men get rich by graft rather than by work, when laws don’t protect producers from looters but rather disarm producers and put them at the mercy of looters, when you see corruption being rewarded, and honesty becoming self-sacrifice, then you know that your society is doomed.

When true evil becomes the means of survival, then do not expect men to be good. Do not expect men to remain moral and sacrifice their lives to become fodder for the immoral. Do not expect able men to continue to produce when production goes unrewarded and looting is rewarded. If a society calls money evil, then do not be surprised if those men of ability, those competent and able men, those men capable of making money, those men of virtue, cease to produce. What man of virtue would choose to do something evil and disreputable?

When you call money evil, when you defame and demean the producers of wealth, when you seek to bind the producers of wealth to be enslaved to moochers and looters, then you deserve to live in an evil country. There was a time when wealth was produced from the labor of slaves, and then it was an evil. The man who sees the power of the dollar as being no different than the power of the whip, has never felt the whip upon his flesh. If money were not the tool by which men trade with one another, then there remains the whip and the gun. Which would you choose? There was a time when wealth was obtained by conquest and by force of arms, and then it was an evil. Always before in history, men thought of wealth as being fixed in quantity, to be siezed, to be begged, taken by conquest, inherited, shared, looted or bestowed upon one by favor. Only in our society, have men understood that wealth could be created. The very phrase “to make money” originated in America. In a free nation, in a country of reason, justice, and achievement, money is earned by production. In a free country, man’s mind is set free, and fortune can be achieved by work. In a free nation, money is no evil. Rather, it is the essence of human morality.

It all depends on how you define evil, doesn’t it?

This is going to turn into one of our “there is no evil" debates.

I say there is no evil

Money is like the blood within the body, it transports all the necessary minerals, substances and elements to the cells, as well as oxygen. So too, does money serve to supply society with all it needs.

However, if blood as gradually taken out of the system to pool elsewhere, it causes anaema and finally a shock-condition that leads to death. So it is with the amassing of money with the few.

When Organs have to compete for blood, like when the stomache is full and the portal vein draws the blood to deal with the substances that arise from digestion, we feel it by becoming tired because we have less oxygen transported to the brain.

Fortunately our body doesn’t aggressively compete but has built in safety valves. Our society does compete agressively and has fewer and fewer safety valves - which means that other parts of society, sometimes important parts, have to go without.

It would be advisable to learn from nature and understand that money must flow if our social ‘organism’ is to be healthy.

Shalom
Bob

i think you have a point bob… but we’d have to reconsider how money flows no?

money is not evil. it is the use of money, that is evil. the love of money destroys the human person. :confused:

White Lotus, just to confuse you, I have to compliment you on a damn good post. What I don’t understand is why as a matter of tactics you insult people?

I wonder where we would be with out money?
Would we have advanced the way or of the rate we have?

I am spending this summer reading Aristotle’s Ethics word for word and I clearly remember him definging money as something that equalizes things in our world and helps us with justice insofar as we can use money to know the value of things and then trade justly or give our just punishments and rewards. Its original purpose is something of that nature. To place a value on objects and eventually to help establish fair trade and justice in a way. It is not the root of all evil. People make choices to do things that drive them away from goodness. Money is just the median. If two people fight over money, then they seem to value a piece of paper more than the worth of a human being in some cases. Once again, money establishes equality. People can break that equality by using money unjustly(either taking too much for themselves, or giving someone else too little). But in either case, its people and the choices they make. Its not money because money can be replaced by gold and then we would all fight over that and clam that gold is the root of all evil. Then we can replace gold with diamonds and claim that diamonds are the root of all evil. Things just do not add up that way. There has to be a point where someone is smart enough to say 'Hey look. Maybe this money is not the problem. Maybe there is a deeper issue behind all this that has to do with rationality and the way in which human beings make choices with the moeny that they have"

Yeah, that about nails it. Education costs money, right? And the most educated people theoretically have the best opprotunities to “make money”, ya follow me? I’d say it’s pretty damn evil to exploit uneducated children by forcing them to make shoes because it’s the only way to make money to feed their families because foreign investors/companies have taken over their local economy.

Money works just fine within a closed economic system i.e. one country/ group of countries on equal terms. Hey! there’s equality popping up again.

Money can be a source of equality when it is applied to a situation that is already equal i.e. a shoemaker makes a pair of shoes and sells them to a brick-layer who recieved money for laying bricks, then goes to buy vegetables from a farmer. The shoemaker, bricklayer and farmer all did equal amounts of work and contributed to society in some positive way, there is equality.

Works fine till the shoemaker decides to drive to the farm, so he has to buy gas from George W. who went and killed a bunch of brown people (which most westerners don’t consider to be real people any way) so the companies that gave him a bunch of money to sell an image to American voters (wasn’t enough because Gore won anyway) can get government contracts to obtain a commodity, that they wouldn’t have had access to without all the murder, then sell that commodity back to Dubya so the shoemaker can drive his lazy ass to buy an ass-load of meat because he’s on the Atkins diet because he stopped doing real work (shoemaking) and decided to go to a country were they don’t have labor laws and get brown people to make shoes for him and pay them pennies to do it, but he is also selling his shoes, along with millions of other westerners selling their crap to brown people who are now relying on foreign industry and products rather than getting a chance to start their own industries and educational institutions. Where was the moral contract you were talking about? Was it the murder, or the exploitation? Or economic repression?

So to sum-up my point, money works fine, sans colonialism. But I guess your limited capitalist mind couldn’t see very far past the brim of your top hat to realize that.

Probably not what you or Aristotle was getting at, but maby money is just a stepping stone that we can out-grow and move on to a more efficient form of economy, that doesn’t rely on exploitation and wealth-hoarding.

Too bad, 'cause it seems to me like it’s that kind of men who have the most money.

I forgot to give credit where credit was due, and for that I sincerly apologize. I did not and do not want to take credit for another’s thinking. This philosophy on money is not original thought. It is Ayn Rand from that author’s famous fictional work on a fictional break down in industrial society. It just struck me as being philosophy disguised as fiction, and I wanted to see what others thought of it when presented as philosophy not as fiction. I don’t know enough about Ayn to know if Ayn ever intended it to be taken as philosophy over fiction. It was a particular point of view of a particular fictional character, but clearly it strikes a cord, doesn’t it?

The responses have been predictable:

  1. Personal insults, directed at me, which I will happily shoulder, and which I think reveal the character of the attacker.
  2. Left wing liberal attitudes that:
    a) Most or many or all men of wealth lack virtue and honor
    i) I don’t think this a bias, predjudice, and generality worthy of response
    ii) Any person of wealth who feels guilty about their wealth will not have it for long, so only men of honor and virtue will long keep their wealth.
    b) Money is the tool of the oppressor and the colonizer
    i) Hisorically true but not true in current modern context
    ii) Colonization was an evil and Slavery was an evil
    iii) Evils of the past do not apply to money as it functions among free men in free trade, and that is the context of this philosophy
    c) Education is not free
    i) I disagree. A public library card and a voracious apetite for reading is all that is needed to obtain an excellent education on almost any topic, including “How to read” and “How to study”
    1) From knowledge can come experimentation, and from experimentation can come successful application of knowledge
    ii) Educational credentials are not required to acquire the knowledge of how to make money.
    1) Those careers that require educational credentials to enter, that are licensed and regulated, are a small protion of the total landscape of opportunity.
    2) Money made can be reinvested in education
    3) Self-made and self-educated men have acquired a great deal of wealth

Ayn Rand… I should’ve known as much. Ayn Rand is a biased, short-sighted, single minded, outdated fascist.

Wo/Men of honor and virtue would know that there are people who need help, and so wo/men of honor and virtue would not keep their material wealth for long.

Get your head out of Ayn Rand’s ass and take a look at the world around you. Money always has been and most definately is now a tool of the oppressor. Take a look here gatt.org/trastat_e.html

Tell that to your average Somalian. Tell that to the kids working in the sweatshops.

Sweatshop, some oprotunity. Read the part of the article in the link about pay for unskilled labor decreasing.

Yep, money sure can be reinvested in providing free education for people who haven’t had all the advantages! I guess your not an entirely lost case.

I believe that truly virtuous charity is that which prepares a man to provide for himself. So I would agree that free education is an excellent way to be charitable. Charity which merely cripples a man’s incentive to work and renders him dependant upon charity for his livelihood is a vice. In the socialism and communism, men are taught to become dependent upon the state, as if they are owed survival, and they become leeches on society living off the productivity of honorable, just men. If he who has the greatest need is given the most, then the survival skill becomes being needy rather than being productive. They even are taught that surviival is owed to them as a right, which is a patent lie, used by immoral politicians to win the votes of the masses. Whenever you see the law used to render the producers as the slaves of the unproductive, when the producers of wealth are defamed and laid upon the altar as sacrifices to the unproductive, then you know that your society is doomed. This was the failure of communism and is the failure of welfare states in general. But educating a man and preparing him with the survival skill he needs to earn money and provide for himself and his dependants, is indeed the most honorable and ethical form of charity. And I also believe that charity is the greatest evidence of a man’s potency.

You talk a lot about sweatshops in third world countries. While the ability to make money is a virtue, true virtue depends not only upon what is done, but how it is done. Making money off the misery of others is not honorable or virtuous. There is nothing honorable or virtuous in the forced labor of starving children, which is barely one step above slavery. There is also nothing virtuous in the third world drug lords making money by feeding the drug habit of American and European addicts. These are the extremes and are far from the normal or customary ways that people make money, and I think you know it. You use the extremes to sensationalize your arguements, when the vast majority of producers do not produce wealth off child labor nor off drug addictions. By using these extreme and rare examples, you try to defame the vast majority of honorable and ethical men of virtue who make their money in ways worthy of respect and honor. This belittles your arguement and costs you credibility. I have said in my discussions above that a man who makes his money in disreputable, dishonest, illegal, dishonorable and ignoble ways will not be able to buy the honor or character he has sacrificed in the pursuit of wealth. Money can not repair a faulty character. But to try to characterize the vast majority of men who are rightly proud of how they make their money, by attempting to convict them of the acts of a minority who lack virtue, is a disreputable way to present and arguement and is unworthy of this forum or of yourself, I suspect. I respect your passion for justice and fair treatement of the poor in third world countries, but I do not respect the unfairness of your tactic.

I can’t believe I missed this post. White Lotus you are such an angry jackass you missed The fact that I AGREE WITH YOU on this point. Let me write that again. I FUCKING AGREE WITH YOU. Stop trying to act the misunderstood super genius martyr and read a fucking post. And pleeeeeeeeeaaaaaaase stop with the goofy straussian “I might die for my philosophical beliefs” crap.

You don’t live in china. You live in Western Europe, for god’s sake. “smart enough to receive some education” spooky words - Are you looking for the right katamite to educate?

Loving or hating money does nothing good or evil for anyone.

Money’s power is merely this…It enables you to be more of what you already are.

Overindulgent prick or genrous philathropic lover of humanity…it makes no difference. Money empowers you to be more of who you really are.

This is a very powerful peice. You have many good points. money is essential for our society to function, but i can’t help but to notice upper class families that have two working parents neglecting their very children, putting them in a day care while they runn off to work so they can afford that new bmw that they have envided for so long. Just because money is earned in an honest manner does not rule out the possibility of it harming a society. not only must we earn our living honestly but we must remember money is only to satisfy comforts and we must not neglect what is infinatly more important.

In Pink Floyds album “The Dark Side of the Moon” which is basically the dark side of life, where they talk about everything that corrupts us. Time, Money, etc. Well, here are the lyrics to the song “money”

[i]Money, get away.
Get a good job with good pay and you’re okay.
Money, it’s a gas.
Grab that cash with both hands and make a stash.
New car, caviar, four star daydream,
Think I’ll buy me a football team.

Money, get back.
I’m all right jack keep your hands off of my stack.
Money, it’s a hit.
Don’t give me that do goody good bullshit.
I’m in the high-fidelity first class traveling set
And I think I need a lear jet.

Money, it’s a crime.
Share it fairly but don’t take a slice of my pie.
Money, so they say
Is the root of all evil today.
But if you ask for a raise it’s no surprise that they’re
Giving none away.[/i]

Tyler: I could not agree with you more. I think another way of saying this is that selfishness is A Way but it is not The Way. Parenting requires the virtue of self-sacrifice, of foregoing some of your selfish wants and desires in favor of doing what is best for your children.

However, whenever I speak of day care, I hesitate to call it neglect. I think that is a bit harsh and judgemental.

I always consider the single Mother (and Dad). Many poor Moms find themselves single and it was clearly not their intention or their plan to be single. It is not what they would have chosen for their child it is merely their reality. And for them, day care is not a choice, it is a matter of survival. So I always think of the single Mom and empathize with their plight, and try to walk in their shoes when I speak of day care. To do otherwise is just meanness.

For me, in chosing a mate, one of the key issues was, will we have children? And if so, who will be the dominant care giver. I knew that it is not me, either by choice or by ability, so I carefully selected a mate who I was choosing to be the Mother of my children, and the dominant caregiver to our children, and who was commited to doing so. The division of duties, who will be the caregiver and who will be the provider, seems to me to be an essential part of the contract two people make when they decide to pro-create. Not that parenting is not a shared activity, it certainly was for us, but at least one of the two parents needs to devote themselves to being there for the pre-school age children on a full-time basis, not just when it is convenient or when they can fit it into their busy schedule.

Back to the single mom, the fact that many men make this contract and then selfishly break it, is not something that makes me proud of my gender. Yes, some women abandon their kids as well, but being a man, I have a harder view of men. Many Moms find themselves abandoned and thrust into proverty because their partners walked away from the bargain. I consider abandoning your children to be a crime. I consider this to be unethical, ignoble, a form of cowardice and a very selfish act. I cannot respect any man who selfishly refuses to provide for his family. I consider it shameful and worthy of public scorn. Jesus Christ taught that a special “Wrath of God” awaited the ones who harmed these little ones, and said it wold be better for them to have a boulder tied around their necks and tossed over a clift. Not sure about the Wrath of God, but it is very bad Karma.

Keeping up with the Joneses is not a Virtue. Being materialistic, consumeristic, whatever name you call it, is not a noble devotion.

As we have said, money will not fix a flawed character.

445: The pop culture often produces songs, films, stand up routines, and so forth that resonate with truth, and seem to encapsulate strong feelings that are part of the collective consciousness. One of my favorite groups is Steppenwolf, for the music, but moreso for the messages. So I think I get what you mean with your Pink Floyd example.

However, I disagree that money corrupts us. If we are corrupt and then money does not fix that. Money will not purchase a virtuous state of character where none exists. When people speak of money corrupting someone, what I think they mean is that the person did not have the strength of character to control their impulses and to temper their desires, Money will not buy happiness, but if someone has no core values, and no idea what makes him happy, then wealth makes the world your oyster, and enables one to sample all the earthly delights. Sex, Drugs, etc. The only consolation that can be offered to the unworthy man who finds himself with wealth that exceeds his character, such as often seems so happen to atheletes and performers, is just this.

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.