Francisco's "Money Speech"
Rearden heard Bertram Scudder, outside the group, say to a girl
who made some sound of indignation, "Don't let him disturb you.
You know, money is the root of all evil- and he's the typical product
of money."
Rearden did not think that Francisco could have heard it, but he
saw Francisco turning to them with a gravely courteous smile.
"So you think that money is the root of all evil?" said
Francisco d'Aconia. "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?"
"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 nor 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? "
"Have you ever looked for the root of production? Take a look
at an electric generator and dare tell yourself that it was created
by the muscular effort of unthinking brutes. Try to grow a seed of
wheat without the knowledge left to you by men who had to discover
it for the first time. Try to obtain your food by means of nothing
but physical motions- and you'll learn that man's mind is the
root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever
existed on earth."
"But you say that money is made by the strong at the expense
of the weak? What strength do you mean? It is not the strength of
guns or muscles. Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think.
Then is money made by the man who invents a motor at the expense
of those who did not invent it? Is money made by the intelligent
at the expense of the fools? By the able at the expense of the incompetent?
By the ambitious at the expense of the lazy? Money is made- before
it can be looted or mooched- made by the effort of every honest man,
each to the extent of his ability. An honest man is one who knows
that he can't consume more than he has produced."
"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 by 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
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, then 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?"
"But money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you
wish, but it will not replace you as the driver. It will give
you the means for the satisfaction of your desires, but it will
not provide you with desires. Money is the scourge of the men who
attempt to reverse the law of causality- the men who seek to replace
the mind by seizing the products of the mind."
"Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept
of what he wants; money will not give him a code of values, if he's
evaded the knowledge of what to value, and it will not provide him
with a purpose, if he's evaded the choice of what to seek. Money
will not buy intelligence for the fool, or admiration for the coward,
or respect for the incompetent. The man who attempts to purchase
the brains of his superiors to serve him, with his money replacing
his judgment, ends up by becoming the victim of his inferiors. The
men of intelligence desert him, but the cheats and the frauds come
flocking to him, drawn by a law which he has not discovered: that
no man may be smaller than his money. Is this the reason why you
call it evil?"
"Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth-
the man who would make his own fortune no matter where he started.
If an heir is equal to his money, it serves him; if not, it destroys
him. But you look on and you cry that money corrupted him. Did it?
Or did he corrupt his money? Do not envy a worthless heir; his wealth
is not yours and you would have done no better with it. Do not think
that it should have been distributed among you; loading the world
with fifty parasites instead of one, would not bring back the dead
virtue which was the fortune. Money is a living power that dies without
its root. Money will not serve that mind that cannot match it. Is
this the reason why you call it evil?"
"Money is your means of survival. The verdict which you pronounce
upon the source of your livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon
your life. If the source is corrupt, you have damned your own existence.
Did you get your money by fraud? By pandering to men's vices or men's
stupidity? By catering to fools, in the hope of getting more than
your ability deserves? By lowering your standards? By doing work
you despise for purchasers you scorn? If so, then your money will
not give you a moment's or a penny's worth of joy. 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, because it would not pinch-hit for your self-respect?
Evil, because it would not let you enjoy your depravity? Is this
the root of your hatred of money?"
"Money will always remain an effect and refuse to replace
you as the cause. Money is the product of virtue, but it will
not give you virtue and it will not redeem your vices. Money will
not give you the unearned, neither in matter nor in spirit. Is
this the root of your hatred of money?"
"Or did you say it's the love of money that's the root of
all evil? To love a thing is to know and love its nature. To
love money is to know and love the fact that money is the creation
of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort
for the effort of the best among men. It's the person who would
sell his soul for a nickel, who is the loudest in proclaiming his
hatred of money- and he has good reason to hate it. The lovers
of money are willing to work for it. They know they are able to
deserve it."
"Let me give you a tip on a clue to men's
characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably;
the man who respects it has earned it."
"Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is
evil. That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter.
So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with
one another- their only substitute, demands of you the highest virtues,
if you wish to make it or to keep it. Men who have no courage, pride,
or self-esteem, men who have no moral sense of their right to their
money and are not willing to defend it as they defend their life,
men who apologize for being rich- will not remain rich for long.
They are the natural bait for the swarms of looters that stay under
rocks for centuries, but come crawling out at the first smell of
a man who begs to be forgiven for the guilt of owning wealth. They
will hasten to relieve him of the guilt- and of his life, as he deserves."
"Then you will see the rise of the double standard--the men
who live by force, yet count on those who live by trade to create
the value of their looted money- the men who are the hitchhikers
of virtue. In a moral society, these are the criminals, and the statutes
are written to protect you against them. But when a society establishes
criminals-by-right and looters-by-law- men who use force to seize
the wealth of disarmed victims- then money becomes its creators'
avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men,
once they've passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes
the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it.
Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those
most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer
wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread
of ruins and slaughter."
"Do you wish to know whether that day is coming? Watch money. Money
is the barometer of a society's virtue. When you see that trading
is done, not by consent, but by compulsion- when you see that
in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who
produce nothing- when you see that money is flowing to those
who deal, not in goods, but in favors- when you see that men get
richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect
you against them, but protect them against you- when you see corruption
being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice- you may
know that your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium
that it does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with
brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property,
half-loot."
"Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying
money, for money is men's protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers
seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This
kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary
power of an aribitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value,
an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth
that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected
to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an
account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch
for the day when it becomes, marked: 'Account overdrawn.' "
"When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect
men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their
lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not
expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting
rewarded. Do not ask, 'Who is destroying the world?' You are."
"You stand in the midst of the greatest achievements of the
greatest productive civilization and you wonder why it's crumbling
around you, while your damning its life-blood- money. You look upon
money as the savages did before you, and you wonder why the jungle
is creeping back to the edge of your cities. Throughout men's history,
money was always seized by looters of one brand or another, but whose
method remained the same: to seize wealth by force and to keep the
producers bound, demeaned, defamed, deprived of honor. That phrase
about the evil of money, which you mouth with such righteous recklessness,
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. So long as production was ruled
by force, and wealth was obtained by conquest, there was little to
conquer. Yet through all the centuries of stagnation and starvation,
men exalted the looters, as aristocrats of the sword, as aristocrats
of birth, as aristocarats of the bureau, and despised the producers,
as slaves, as traders, as shopkeepers- as industrialists.
"To the glory of mankind, there was, for the first and only
time in history, a country of money- and I have no higher, more
reverent tribute to pay to America, for this means: a country of
reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement. For the
first time, man's mind and money were set free, and there were
no fortunes-by-conquest, but only fortunes-by-work, and instead
of swordsmen and slaves, there appeared the real maker of wealth,
the greatest worker, the highest type of human being- the self-made
man- the American industrialist.
"If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans,
I would choose- because it contains all the others--the fact that
they were the people who created the phrase 'to make money.' No other
language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always
thought of wealth as a static quantity- to be seized, begged, inherited,
shared, looted, or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first
to understand that wealth has to be created. The words 'to make
money' hold the essence of human morality.
"Yet these were the words for which Americans were denounced
by the rotted cultures of the looters' continents. Now the looters'
credo has brought you to regard your proudest achievements as a hallmark
of shame, your prosperity as guilt, your greatest men, the industrialists,
as blackguards,ark of shame, your prosperity as guilt, your greatest
men, the industrialists, as blackguards, and your magnificent factories
as the product and property of muscular labor, the labor of whip-driven
slaves, like the pyramids of Egypt. The rotter who simpers that he
sees no difference between the power of the dollar and the power
of the whip, ought to learn the difference on his own hide- as, I
think, he will.
"Until and unless you discover that money is the root of
all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases
to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become
the tools of men. Blood, whips and guns- or dollars. Take your
choice- there is no other- and your time is running out."
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