With the floor, Mr. Francisco D’Anconia, Ayn Rand’s character in Atlas Shrugged.

The speech is classic and long, but worth every word:

— — —

On the edge of the group, unnoticed, Rearden heard a woman with large diamond earrings and a sagging, tense face ask nervously:

— Mr. D’Anconia, what do you think will happen to the world?  — Exactly what he deserves.  — Ah, but how cruel you are!  — Do you not believe in the moral law, madam? — Frascisco asked, very seriously. - I believe.

Rearden heard Bertran Scudder, who was outside the group, say to a girl who had made some sound that conveyed indignation:

— Don't worry about him. You know, money is the origin of all evil, it is a typical product of money.

Rearden thought that Franscisco shouldn't have heard the comment, but he saw him turn to them with a very courteous smile:

— So you think that money is the origin of all evil? Have you ever wondered what the origin of money is? Money is an instrument of exchange, which can only exist when there are goods produced and men capable of producing them. Money is the material form of the principle that men who want to trade with each other must exchange one value for another. Money is not the instrument of beggars, who ask for products through tears, nor of looters, who take them by force. Money only becomes possible through the men who produce it. Is this what you consider bad? Those who accept money as payment for their efforts only do so because they know that it will be exchanged for the product of someone else's effort. It is not the beggars nor the looters who give money its value. Neither an ocean of tears nor all the weapons in the world can turn those pieces of paper in your pocket into the bread you need to survive. Those pieces of paper, which should be gold, are pledges of honor; through them you appropriate the energy of the men they produce. Does your wallet affirm the hope that somewhere in the world around you there are men who do not betray that moral principle which is the origin of production? Look at an electricity generator and dare to say that it was created by the muscular effort of irrational creatures. Try to plant a grain of wheat without the knowledge given to you by the men who were the first to plant wheat. Try to obtain food using only physical movements, and you will discover that the mind of man is the origin of all products and all the wealth that has ever been on the earth.

Those who accept money as payment for their efforts only do so because they know that it will be exchanged for the product of someone else's effort. It is not the beggars nor the looters who give money its value. Neither an ocean of tears nor all the weapons in the world can turn those pieces of paper in your pocket into the bread you need to survive. Those pieces of paper, which should be gold, are pledges of honor; through them you appropriate the energy of the men they produce. Does your wallet affirm the hope that somewhere in the world around you there are men who do not betray that moral principle which is the origin of production? Look at an electricity generator and dare to say that it was created by the muscular effort of irrational creatures. Try to plant a grain of wheat without the knowledge given to you by the men who were the first to plant wheat. Try to obtain food using only physical movements, and you will discover that the mind of man is the origin of all products and all the wealth that has ever been on the earth.

But you say that money is made by the strong at the expense of the weak? What force are you referring to? It is not by force of arms or muscles. Wealth is a product of the human capacity to think. So money is made by the man who invents an engine rather than the man who didn't invent it? Is money made by intelligence at the expense of the stupid? For the capable at the expense of the incompetent? For the ambitious at the expense of the lazy? Money is made — before it can be pocketed by morons and looters — by the honest effort of every honest man, each to the extent of his ability. An honest man is one who knows that he cannot consume more than he produces. Trading through money is the code of men of good will. Money is based on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and his work. Money does not allow any power to prescribe the value of your work, other than the voluntary choice of the man who is willing to exchange his work with you. Money allows you to obtain in exchange for your products and your labor what these products and labor are worth to the men who acquire them, and nothing more than that. Money only allows businesses in which there is mutual benefit according to the judgment of the voluntary parties. Money demands the recognition that men need to work for their own benefit, not to their detriment; to profit, not to lose; that men are not beasts of burden, that they are not born to bear the burden of misery; that it is necessary to offer them values, not pain; that the common bond between men is not the exchange of suffering, but the exchange of goods. Money demands that you sell not your weakness to human stupidity, but your talent to human reason; It demands that you buy not the worst that others offer, but the best that your money can buy. And, when men live from commerce — with reason and not by force, as an irrevocable arbiter –, it is the best product that wins, the best performance, the man with the best judgment and greatest capacity — and the degree of a man's productivity is the degree of his reward. This is the code of existence whose instrument and symbol is money. Is this what you consider bad?

But money is just an instrument. He can take you wherever you want, but he cannot replace the driver of the car. He gives you the means to satisfy your desires, but does not create desires for you. Money is the scourge of men who try to reverse the law of causality — the men who try to replace the mind by hijacking the products of the mind. Money does not buy happiness for the man who does not know what he wants; it doesn't give him a code of values if he doesn't have knowledge about values, and it doesn't give him a goal if he doesn't choose a goal. Money does not buy intelligence for the stupid, nor admiration for the coward, nor respect for the incompetent. The man who tries to buy the brain of those who are superior to him to serve him, using money to replace his judgment, ends up a victim of those who are inferior to him. Intelligent men abandon him, but cheats and swindlers flock to him, attracted by a law he did not discover: man cannot be less than the money he possesses. Is that why you consider money bad? Only the man who does not need the inherited fortune deserves to inherit it — he who would make his fortune anyway, even without inheritance. If an heir is equal to his inheritance, she serves him; otherwise, it destroys it. But you say that money corrupted. Was it really? Or was he the one who corrupted your money? Do not envy an heir who is worthless; His wealth is not yours, and you would not have made better use of it. Don't think it should be distributed; creating fifty parasites instead of one does not revive the dead virtue that created fortune.

Money is a living power that dies when it moves away from its origin. Money does not serve a mind that is not up to it. Is that why you consider him bad? Money is your means of survival. The verdict you give to the source of your livelihood is the verdict you give to your own life. If the source is corrupt, you condemn your own existence. Does your money come from fraud? The exploration of vices and human stupidity? Did you get it by serving fools, in the hope that they would give you more than your abilities deserve? Lowering your standards? Doing work you despise for buyers you don't respect? In this case, your money will not give you a single moment of happiness. All the things you acquire will not be a tribute to you, but an accusation; not an accomplishment, but a moment of shame. Then you will say that money is bad. Bad because it doesn't replace your self-love? Bad because he doesn't allow you to enjoy his depravity? Is this the reason for your hatred of money? Money will always be an effect, and nothing will ever replace it as a cause. Money is a product of virtue, but it does not give virtue or redeem vices. Money does not give you what you do not deserve, neither in material terms nor in spiritual terms. Is this the reason for your hatred of money? Or did you say that it is the love of money that is the origin of all evil?

To love a thing is to know and love its nature. Loving money is knowing and loving the fact that money is created by the best force within you, your master key that allows you to exchange your effort for the effort of the best men there are. The man who would sell his soul for a penny is the one who cries loudest that he hates money — and he has good reason to hate it. Those who love money are willing to work to earn it. They know they are capable of deserving it. Here is a good clue to know the character of men: he who curses money obtains it dishonorably; he who respects it earns it honestly. Run away from the man who says money is bad. This statement is the stigma that identifies the looter, just as the bell indicated the leper. As long as men live together on earth and need a means to trade, if they abandon money, the only substitute they will find will be the barrel of a rifle. But money demands the highest virtues from you, if you want to earn it or keep it.

The men who have no courage, no pride, no self-respect, who have no moral conviction that they deserve the money they have and are not willing to defend it as they defend their own lives, the men who apologize for being rich — these are not going to stay rich for long. They are easy prey for the swarms of looters who have lived under the rocks for centuries, but who come out of hiding as soon as they smell a man who asks for forgiveness for the crime of possessing wealth. They will quickly free you from this guilt. Then you will see the rise of men who live double lives — who live by force but depend on those who live by commerce to create the value of the money they plunder. These men live by hitchhiking with virtue. In a society where there are morals they are the criminals, and laws are made to protect citizens against them. But when a society creates a category of legitimate criminals and legal looters — men who use force to seize the wealth of unarmed victims — then money becomes the avenger of those who created it. Such looters think there is no danger in robbing defenseless men after they pass a law disarming them. But the proceeds of their loot end up attracting other looters, who loot them as they did the unarmed men. And so the thing continues, always winning not the one who produces the most, but the one who is most relentless in his brutality. When the standard is force, the killer beats the pickpocket. And then this society disappears, amidst ruins and slaughter.

Do you want to know if this day is approaching? Watch the money. Money is the barometer of a society's virtue. When there is commerce not by consent, but by compulsion — when to produce it is necessary to ask permission from men who produce nothing — when money flows to those who do not sell products, but influence — when men become richer through bribery and favors than through work, and laws do not protect those who produce from those who steal, but those who steal from those who produce — when corruption is rewarded and honesty becomes a sacrifice — you can be sure that society is doomed. Money is such a noble means of exchange that it does not compete with weapons and does not make concessions to brutality. It does not allow a country to survive if half is property and half is the product of looting. Whenever destroyers arise, the first thing they destroy is money, for money protects men and forms the basis of moral existence. The destroyers take possession of the gold and leave a pile of false paper in exchange. This destroys all objective standards and puts men in the hands of an arbitrary determiner of values. Money was an objective value, equivalent to the wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on non-existent wealth, supported by a gun aimed at those who have to produce it. The paper is a check issued by legal looters on an account that is not theirs: the virtue of their victims. Be careful that one day the check is returned, with the stamp: ’no funds’. If you make evil the means of survival, it is not to be expected that men will remain good. It is not to be expected that they will continue to follow morality and sacrifice their lives for the benefit of the immoral. They cannot be expected to produce, when production is punished and looting is rewarded. Don't ask who is destroying the world: it's you. You live in the midst of the greatest achievements of the most productive civilization in the world and you don't know why it is clearly crumbling, while you curse the blood that runs through its veins — money. You see money as the savages did, and you don't know why the jungle is growing on the outskirts of the cities. Throughout history, money has always been stolen by looters of different types, with different names, but whose method has always been the same: taking the money by force and keeping the producers' hands tied, demoted, defamed, dishonored. This statement that money is the origin of evil, which you pronounce with so much conviction, comes from the time when wealth was the product of slave labor — and slaves repeated the movements that were discovered by someone's intelligence and for centuries were not perfected.

As long as production was governed by force, and wealth was obtained by conquest, there was not much to conquer. However, over centuries of stagnation and famine, men exalted the looters, as aristocrats of the sword, aristocrats of breed, aristocrats of the tribune, and despised the producers, as slaves, merchants, shopkeepers — industrialists. To the glory of humanity, there was, for the first and only time in history, a nation of money — and I know of no greater praise for the United States than this, for it signifies a country of reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement. For the first time, the human mind and money were freed, and there were no fortunes acquired by conquest, but only by work, and instead of swordsmen and slaves, there emerged the true creator of wealth, the greatest worker, the highest type of human being — the self-made man — the American industrialist. If you ask me what the greatest distinction Americans have, I would choose — because it contains all the others — the fact that it was Americans who created the expression “making money”. No other language, no other people had ever used these words before, but “make money”; Before, men always viewed wealth as a static quantity, to be taken, asked for, inherited, shared, plundered or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created. The expression ‘making money’ summarizes the essence of human morality. However, it was precisely because of this expression that Americans were criticized for the rotten cultures of the plundering continents.

The ideology of the looters made people like you start to see their greatest achievements as a shameful stigma, their prosperity as guilt, their greatest children, the industrialists, as villains, their magnificent factories as the product and property of muscular work, the work of slaves powered by whips, as in the construction of the pyramids in Egypt. The rotten minds that say they see no difference between the power of the dollar and the power of the lash deserve to learn the difference in their own skin, which, I believe, is what will end up happening. As long as people like you do not discover that money is the origin of all good, they will be heading towards their own destruction. When money ceases to be the instrument through which men deal with each other, men become men's instruments. Blood, whips, guns — or dollars. Make your choice — there is no other option — and time is running out.

— — —

So, do you agree with Ayn Rand?

Originally published on MEDIUM