Introduction to Logic

¶ … 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 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."

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 of a society's relative economic health -- ironically, one of the least healthy examples of a monetary system could be found in the formerly fascist countries of Latin America, with highly imbalanced social structures that became afflicted with tremendous hyperinflation when these leading capitalist dictators fell from power, and society fell into social dissolution and revolt. But what critics argue against, when they say money is the root of evil, is the idea that using material gain as the ultimate value of human achievement is questionable.

Thus Rand's protagonist begs the question -- is what his attackers allege is not that money is bad, but that being merely motivated by external societal approval and physical rewards the be all and end all of human existence. Be ashamed if your wealth is inherited, Rand says, rather than won from one's own sweat. But if one's financial success is the result of selling stocks as a day trader, rather than generated by one's own ideas and efforts, and the new aristocracy is money translated into a Gucci bag or some other status symbol that has no purpose other than to accrue shallow and immediate societal approval of the eye -- is this so superior to inherited wealth or wealth won in poor terms. Capitalist wealth won merely by manipulating the wealth of others, and used to confirm rather than threaten common notions of value can be just as slavishly pursued as wealth itself, and even may generate such pandering. Rand argues against pandering, true, but is blind to the fact that advertising in capitalism may require such slavish devotion to common ideas and ideals to sell itself and to be marketable. After all, her own texts could not rival Harlequin Romances and other novels of common and false cultural myths on the bestseller's charts.