I recently re-read (or rather, re-listened to the book on CD) Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. One of the great speeches in that book, which I actually hadn’t remembered, is the speech from Francisco d’Anconia debating the argument that money is the root of all evil. It’s reproduced here and here. Worth a read.
“So you think that money is the root of all evil?” said Francisco d’Anconia. “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 and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle 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. Is this what you consider evil?
That’s great…so, hows abouts you puts the wedding pictures up.
Comment by Schulte — August 24, 2003 @ 6:54 pm
[...] I enjoy almost every essay that Paul Graham writes, and his recent one on wealth was no exception. He sounds quite libertarian… the speech is reminiscent of Francisco D’Anconia’s money speech in Atlas Shrugged. A few highlights: People like baseball more than poetry, so baseball players make more than poets. To say that a certain kind of work is underpaid is thus identical with saying that people want the wrong things. With the rise of the middle class, wealth stopped being a zero-sum game. Jobs and Wozniak didn’t have to make us poor to make themselves rich. Quite the opposite: they created things that made our lives materially richer. They had to, or we wouldn’t have paid for them. [...]
Pingback by Captain’s Log » Paul Graham on Wealth — November 13, 2006 @ 2:51 pm