The Meaning of Money, Assessment Example

“Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand is a very philosophical content for different levels, but one of those levels is its clarification of the meaning and nature of money, and how the process through which it is created.  In one well-known speech, the successful, wealthy and business person’s character Francisco D’ Anconia, person says:

“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? “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.”

It meant that money is considered the only civilized means that through which we can deal with one another.  Even though money and wealth are believed to be evil, it is the system of exchanging our best thing with the best things of others.  It has also been believed that money is the only option in order to fighting with one another for what we need.  In this excerpt Ayn Rand has taken money as the fruit of applied effort and intelligence.

For this excerpt, Ayn Rand is generally and wrongly considered to be only revolving around money, but that is entirely false and incorrect.  She was in fact more concerned in the moral standard at the back of money – that it symbolizes the advantages of rationality.  Where the money was attained either by way of “stealing” – the incompetent and lazy parasitically obtaining it as if they in through any system deserved it by way of neediness – or looting.

In discussing the meaning of money Ayn Rand states that the government deliberately grabs money from the few producers for remaining in order to set the pockets of the well-connected and corrupt.  Cash basically becomes insignificant. Concerning to this Ayn Rand succeed to clear that money first need to be generated by the productive work before the time that it can be seized.

Ayn Rand says that through out the history of men, money was detained by looters of one brand name or another, whose particulars about name has been changed, but whose seizing methods remained the identical: in order to seize wealth by power and to maintain the producers demeaned, bound, deprived of honor and defamed. The phrase concerning about the wickedness or bad of money appears from such time when wealth was generated by the slaves labor who replicate the motions once revealed by the mind of somebody and left unimproved for centuries.

Ayn Rand in this excerpt means that money demands highest virtues from your side if you want to earn it. Those people who have no pride, courage or self respect, people who don’t have moral sense concerning to their right for their money and are not intended to guard it as they guard their life, and men who say sorry for being rich—will not become rich for long period. They have the natural attraction concerning to the swarms of looters that reside under rocks from  centuries, but proved crawling out just looking at the man who ask for to be forgiven for the responsibility of owning wealth. They will rush to ease him from the guilt—and for his life, as he deserves.  In short, money is such noble source that it cannot be competed with the gunshots and in this way it does not make conditions with cruelty. It cannot allow any country to stay alive as half-loot and half-property.