¶ … Capitalists of the World Unite! You Have Everything to Gain -- profit, individual excellence, and personal appeal!
In her fictional work of philosophy entitled Atlas Shrugged, one of Ayn Rand's central characters, Francisco d'Anconia, expresses outrage at the expressed ideal that "money is the root of all evil." He argues instead that money is the root of all human advancement and gain. Money provides motivation for humans to rise above the level of beasts and create unique works of human production and the imagination. Money is an objective standard of valuation, unlike airy systems of merit that are open to bias. It is for this reason, d'Anconia ominously says, why the systems of money evaluation and money production is one of the first things that are attacked by invaders, when attempting to destroy a country.
Rand's protagonist accuses those that spout "that phrase about the evil of money," as being aristocrats. She states that such an idea 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." In other words, before capitalism, individuals labored at brute tasks for no reward, other than not to be lashed to death by their masters. Even today, the only people who really despise money are those who gain it by corruption, pandering, and fraud, for if the "source is corrupt, you have damned your own existence ... Then...
Then you'll scream that money is evil. Evil."
But merely because an individual is rewarded with money for subordinate or slavish actions today does not mean that money is intrinsically evil. Now there is another option other than slave labor, or to labor slavishly for money -- one can become an entrepreneur, work independently and creatively, and receive remuneration for this. "The words to make money hold the essence of human morality," states this philosophical advocate of unchecked capitalism. He states the American self-made man, often despised because such an individual is an unglamorous industrialist or a shopkeeper, is in fact a hero because his money is hard and honestly won.
One of the central problems in Rand's argumentation, however, is that the love of money is conflated in this argument, with the love of material goods. The argument that "money is the root of all evil" is really a spurious argument, advanced by a straw man created by the author. Few people would suggest that money is actually evil. Most would agree, even Karl Marx that the function of money is merely to act a placeholder, as schema of establishing value within a particular society. The system of barter and exchange, for money and for goods, cannot be really destroyed by looters, as her protagonist alleges. True, it can be used as a barometer…
