Money as a Moral Institution

I found this
link via Hacker News:

Francisco’s Money Speech from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. I remember being really, really
inspired by it the last time I read Atlas Shrugged as a 20-year-old
undergraduate student in India. The fact that I am a businessman today
owes a lot to Ayn Rand’s work. After 20 years, I still find that speech
inspiring, particularly in these times when the Federal Reserve and
practically the entire profession of academic economists is treating
money as if it were a mere electronic entry in the books of an
institution somewhere.

I can do no better than quote the moral clarity of Rand’s prose:

When you accept money in payment 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 moochers or the looters who give value to money. Not an ocean of
tears not all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your
wallet into the bread you will 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 your 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, Is this what you consider evil?

…

To trade by means of money is the code of the 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, but no more. Money permits no deals except those to 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 gain, not their loss–the recognition that they are not beasts of
burden, born to carry the weight of your misery–that you must offer them
values, 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 men’s stupidity, but your talent to their reason; it demands
that you buy, not the shoddiest they offer, but the best that your 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 is
money. Is this what you consider evil?

Those words are particularly relevant today, where financial engineers from
the Federal Reserve are trying to bail out the financial engineers of Wall
Street; together their financial engineering has fundamentally altered the
nature of money and credit, massively redistributing wealth away from the
productive segments of the economy towards the speculative financier class.
Basically what we had for a decade or more is

financialism, not capitalism in
the true sense of the word. Capital arises from savings, i.e., deferred
consumption. When Fed-orchestrated easy credit masquerades as real capital, the
predictable consequence of that illusion is the mess we find ourselves in.
History records numerous instances of it and none of them had a happy ending.

Yet, the tragedy of the present
episode is how strong the mainstream consensus has been – it is an
unquestioned article of faith among the decision makers that it is the
role of the government to bail out the financial speculators and convert the debt of private institutions into government debt, while the men who ran these institutions get to keep the massive rewards they reaped based on the illusory past profits. To pay for all that newly socialized debt, the productive classes have to pay more taxes in future and suffer more inflation, all in the name of fairness. In other
words, in order to save the world, we have to destroy the moral
foundation of its money.

People who call themselves Keynesian should
heed the great man’s own warning:

Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the
Capitalistic System was to debauch the currency… Lenin was certainly right.
There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society
than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of
economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one
man in a million can diagnose.

COMMENTS (9)

Suggest reading “a brief history of the future” by
jacques attali for historical history of capitalism.

I knew after first reading something you wrote that there was something about you that was different from almost every person I’ve read. I’ve found it. You are impeccable and inspiring in citing the debauchery of money. Modern leaders have no claim to where money comes from, they do not know philosophy. Now I see why your company is so successful. You understand value.

It is not all that clear cut to me. I used to be a big fan of Ayn Rand when I first read her, which was about four years ago when I was an undergraduate. But, over time, I’ve come to the conclusion her views were much too extreme to be taken seriously.

From where I see the current financial situation, it all seems like just guesswork anyway. You’re saying that strategy X will be somewhat painful in the short term but beneficial in the longer term. The other point of view is that Y will minimize short term pain while not really having any long term effects. Can anybody really say with certainty that what they expect to happen will indeed happen? There are too many variables outside the control of any group of institutions, and the best anybody can do is make educated guesses about what is likely to happen. Let’s not forget that the price of a mistake is paid in peoples’ livelihoods. Therefore, I find it somewhat disconcerting that there are so many absolutist opinions floating around.

Its always good to hear a little Rand once in a while… so many people I know think of her as a great evil bent on destroying the world. This, I affirm, is a fact; I attend Columbia University (one of the epicenters of liberal propaganda) so this may not be so difficult to digest. I find it amazing that Americans have become so disillusioned about what we are doing to our economy. I fear that the road to realization may turn to be very long. Let it be noted, then, that I understand wealth and value. I have no debt; borrow no money; stay away from the government dole; and spend only what I earn. Beware the Destroyer!

Ironically it is not the Engineer’s fault… but the ingenious nature of the business men leveraging the benefits of the instruments created by these engineers. A philosopher’s view of Money will certainly not be the same as those of others, but in hard times like these – these views take higher prominence… no wonder! What is sad about current situation is that the governments have no choice but to come to the rescue of these tradesmen (read Bankers, Insurers, RE Speculators) in order to protect the interests of the rest of us. The moral of the story should not be lost though – Engineers Beware of what You create! You never know who will get their hands on it!!

While I do not disagree with most of what Ayn Rand says there is a thread of emotional irrationality (fanaticism?) embedded in all that logic which is numbing in its absolutism. Like a fracture running through an otherwise perfect facade. Time as they say reveals all. “the common bond among men is the exchange of not goods but happiness”. When this distinction is realized then I think we will have arrived at the first step in eliminating finance as a measure of success or succor.

Money is a virtual representation of value. So it is ironic that we have taken it to have literal meaning and doubly ironic that global financiers are manipulating the literal meaning to serve some narrow personal agenda which in any case is self defeating.

Hopefully there is a way out of this madness…

Money is as such good in the present world. But basic human greed and selfishness and want of opulence has created this so called cancer.

Money should be rewardable for hardwork, frugality, social giving etc. At any point of time you become selfish enough, you lose it. It cannot be abused. If it is, the abuse comes back on the individual.

We (every human being) needs to learn how to respect money. Only when the day comes when people with money help the poor through any form, be it to donate, to create jobs or any other form, the world will be in order. But human selfishness and greed has gone beyond the entire universe. I feel a big bang should happen to reset values and system. And I feel that day is not far.

it is perhaps humbling to consider that we are still infants in our understanding of the total summation of capital, and that it may take several more decades (if not centuries) for our knowledge of capital to outstrip the damage of our ignorance.

consider that modern medicine tolerated bloodletters and shamans for many years longer than it has trusted radiologists and neurologists. we may still be quite early in our understanding of the science of finance, and there may be many future cancers of capital we cannot cure before we learn how to comfortably heal the moneylenders and their sick children.

hope we learn faster.

Can’t agree more with that. It looks like lots of people forgot that money is a mean and not a goal to reach. Sadly, good sense will always make us back to reality.

COMMENTS (9)

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