A Blast from the Past

Before you tuck your pet liberal in on Christmas Eve and get em all snuggly into the bed as he waits for Obama Claus. Here is a classic bedtime story I want you to share with them as my grandfather did with me every year.

They Demand That Which They Have Not Earned.

“So they think 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 by men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principles 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.

“When you accept money 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 moocher or the looter who gives value to money. Not an ocean of tears or all the guns in the world can transfer those pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread you 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 a 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.

“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 muscular effort of unthinking brutes. Try to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by men who had discovered it for the first time. Try to obtain your food by the means of nothing but physical motion- and you’ll learn that man’s mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that ever existed on earth.

“But they say that money is made by the strong at the expense of the weak? What strength do they mean? It is not the strength of guns or muscle. Wealth is the product of man’s capacity to think. Then is money made by the man that invents the generator 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 mooched or looted, made by the efforts of every honest man, each to the extent of his ability. An honest man is one who knows that he can’t consume more then he has produced.

“To trade by means of money is the code of 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 and no more. Money permits no deals except those of 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 own gain, not their loss, the recognition that they are not beast of burden, born to carry the weight of their misery, that they must offer value, 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 man’s stupidity, but your talent to their reason. It demands that you buy not the shoddiest they can offer, but the best that 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 are money.

“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 of the satisfaction of you desires, but it will not provide you with desires. Money is the scourge of men who try law of causality- the men who seek to replace the mind by seizing the products of the mind.

“Money will not purchase the 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 give him 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 tries to purchase the brain’s of his superiors to serve him, with his money replacing his judgment, ends up becoming victims of his inferiors. The men of intelligence desert him, but the cheats and the frauds come flocking to him, drawn by a law that he has not discovered, that no man may be smaller then his money.

“Money is the means of your survival. The verdict that you pronounce upon the source of you livelihood is the verdict that you pronounce upon your life. If the source is corrupt then you have damned your own existence. Did you get your money by fraud or by pandering to man’s vices or stupidity? By catering to fools in hope of getting more then 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 of joy. Then all the things that 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, because it would not pinch-hit for you self respect. Evil because it would not let you enjoy your depravity. Is this the root of all that is evil.

“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 their hatred for money.

“Or did they say that the love of money is the root of all evil? To love a thing is to know and love it’s nature. To love money is to know and to love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you, and the passkey to trade your effort for the effort of the best among men. It’s the person who will sell his soul for a nickel, who is the 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 man’s character: 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 man lives together on earth and need means to deal with one another- their only substitute if they abandon money is the barrel 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 the man who begs to be forgiven for the quilt of owning wealth. They will hasten to relieve him of the quilt – and of his life, as he deserves.

“Then you will see the rise of the man with 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 statues are written to protect you against them. But when a society establishes a criminal-by-right and a looter-by law- men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims- then money becomes it’s creator’s avenger.

Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they’ve passed the laws to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet of other looters, who get it from them by the same means 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 ruin 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 your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that it 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 man’s protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize the gold and leave to it’s owner a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objectives standards 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 victim. 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 him to stay moral and loose their lives for the purpose of becoming 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 should stand in the midst of the greatest achievement of the greatest productive civilization and you wonder why it is crumbling around you, while your damning it’s life blood- money. You look upon as the savages did before you, and you wonder why the jungle is creeping back to the edge of you cities. Throughout man’s history money was always seized by looters of one brand or another, whose names change, but whose methods remain the same: to seize wealth by force and to keep the producers bound, demeaned, defamed, and 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 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, of aristocrats of the bureau, and despise 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 money and mind 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 makers 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 America- I would choose – because it contains all the others- the fact that we are the people who created the phase “To make money”. No other language or nation had ever used these words before, man had always thought of wealth as a static quantity to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted or obtained by 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 are the words for which Americans are denounced by the rotted cultures of the looter continents. Now the looters’ credo has brought us to regard our proudest achievements as a hallmark of shame, our prosperity as quilt, our greatest men the industrialist as blackguards, and our magnificent factories as the product and property of muscular labor, the labor of a whip-driven slave, like the pyramids of Egypt. The rotter that simpers that he sees no difference between the power of the dollar and the power of the whip, ought to learn to learn the differences 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.