The Morality of Money

By Harrison Weisenborn

Are people who live in capitalist societies motivated primarily, if not solely, by money?

Well, yes, but this is as reductionist as saying that one's stream of consciousness can be jotted

down into a convoluted series of chemical formulas. Just as money should be "the barometer of a

society's virtue", so too should it be a barometer of an individual's virtue. It is a raw indicator of

how much people choose to engage themselves purposefully with the world, in a way in which

others would attribute some monetary value. Speaking analogically rather than

reductionisitically, the desire to make money is the desire to better one's abilities towards

achieving one’s personal ends, and in so doing also has the indirect effect of improving the

conditions of others.

"Blood, whips and guns--or dollars. Take your choice." Through Francisco D'Anconia,

Ayn Rand delivers one of the most stirring paeans in tribute to money and its moral ramifications.

It is this lengthy but insurmountable retort to a woman's shrill denouncement of money's inherent

evil through which Rand unabashedly illustrates the central dichotomy that operates between the

two opposing voices of the novel, the producers and the looters. What begins initially as an

opposition between those who laud and those who loathe self-interest and profit-driven

productivity, escalates, by the novel's shocking climax, into a battle between those who value life,

those "who belong on earth", and those who do not value life, those who indignantly occupy the

earth at the expense of the former.

It may seem to go without saying, but money is not suitable for any utility beyond that of

exchange, least of all a paper fiat currency; its value arises only when it has been widely accepted

as a medium of exchange--therefore, the willing participants in this pragmatic make-believe must

have a rudimentary sense of value. As Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises reflected, "Value is

not intrinsic, it is not in things. It is within us; it is the way in which man reacts to the conditions

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of his environment.” The emergence of mediums of exchange would eventually facilitate the

development of ever-complex economies and an evolving communicative language of prices, but

even in the preceding millennia, simple biologic necessity affixed a primal value to sustenance.

In the formative era of our species this need was met with social cooperation; pack hunting for

the preservation of the tribe as a whole. Further improvement of one's life station beyond a full

stomach, however, would have required transcending the restrictive norms of this collectivist

mentality. It is reasonable to posit then that the first entrepreneurs were those who elevated their

individual desires over those defined by the collective. Where a need wasn't met within their

immediate environment, they ventured to another tribal territory to meet that need. Those with

enough pragmatism, and perhaps empathy, would have arrived at a safe, self-aggrandizing

strategy that entailed an exchange of value for value (my method of crafting weapons in exchange

for your rare building material, for instance), rather than risking their life or the safety of their

tribe by resorting to thievery or murder. This is all to say that the global free-market system, with

its capacity for innovation and "natural selection" of the most efficient producers via competition,

derives from this elemental basis in self-valuation, the capacity not only to be cognizant of one's

own existence and abilities, but to relish them and to make the utmost use of them.

The looters denounce money for the simple reason that they, for various reasons, are

either incapable or reluctant in engaging in purposeful behavior and/or of valuation. Not that

they are totally devoid of these capacities of productivity and valuation, but for the sake of

thematic clarity it is plausible that Rand wished to depict an archetypal mentality that underlies

the various guises of collectivist philosophy: the "blind alley" of petulant irrationality and

malevolence that is couched within every glowing phrase of promoting a public good through

expropriation of private means, in every plea for unconditional love and support, in every myopic

special interest that seeps its way into economic policy. It is this antagonistic mentality into

whom she characterizes in degrees of severity, from the pathetic dependents comprising Hank

Rearden's family, to the murderous nihilism of James Taggart. Perhaps it is the case with these

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characters that Rand's ethos, being the desire to cultivate the best within oneself in order to attain

whatever one considers the best to attain, has become so atrophied or distorted that their human

embodiments have become at best a bureaucratic absurdity, like Chick Morrison, the state-

appointed "Morale Conditioner", or at worst destructive, like Dr. Ferris with his state-funded

Project X.

In the novel, money is treated in two respects: as a medium for arriving at a consensus

between two or more subjective valuations, or, as a necessary evil. According to the latter view,

held by the looters, profits must regrettably be created from the hunt of the free market, but to

allow those profits to remain concentrated in the hands of those who made the biggest kills is

deleterious to the collective. Profits must instead be arbitrarily redistributed to sustain some all-

encompassing, transcendent entity, call it the tribe, People's State, nation, etc., and it is the

dubious function of the high priests, central planners, elected representatives, to execute the

redistribution of once privately-held resources. Most libertarian economists would agree that

such government interventions in the marketplace do little more than to further exacerbate

potential market-failures. Rand takes this observation a step further in her depiction of a welfare-

championing government whose perceived power and size only grows in tandem with the

deterioration of the American economy. "A bureau operates on...principle of inventing needs to

justify its existence," observed William Burroughs. Under this rule of parasitism, money loses its

intended function as a means of rational investment, and instead becomes a crude object

necessary to maintain power for power's sake. Being a token of those who practice the "code of

life", money is an unwelcome reminder of the looters’ sacrosanct inner-truth: that their failures to

realize themselves as individuals, to make money, rather than a sordid currency of promises,

bribes, and threats, are so illumined only by the unbearable light of such avatars as Dagny and

John Galt, and so the former strive, consciously or not, to snuff out the latter's brilliance. Money

makes the looters uncomfortable, just as scenes of opulence failed to properly engage those who

lacked the fundamental sense of having earned their experience, and instead made them vaguely

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disjointed.

The heroes of Atlas Shrugged are buoyant, self-sustaining vessels of purposeful action.

They perceive a reality whose most logical and rewarding means of participation is one of

making mutually beneficent exchanges with other free agents. They exchange value for value, as

exemplified in the truly laissez-faire Galt's Gulch, whose denizens are rational enough as to

ensure that their currency remain secure from artificial inflation and misappropriation, by

reinstating the gold standard. Their foils are those lamentable persons who envisage themselves

in a reality in which they resent having to participate. They are moral vacuums, whose only sense

of fulfillment derives from the detraction and destruction of those who choose to create wealth

through their productive and evaluative abilities. In the "aristocracy of pull", power does not

derive from what one accomplishes or creates, but from how many valuable people one can chide

or threaten into being their vassals. Like bilge rats, the looters unwittingly chew at the hulls of

those people who keep them afloat--that is, until those vessels of self-interested enterprise, in a

climate of myopic union demands and quasi-socialist market controls, begin to sink altogether.

The nefarious commercial regulations promulgated by the novel's ostensibly corporatist

U.S. government are introduced under an aegis of welfare and benevolence. Over the novel’s

course, however, the increasingly authoritarian directives betray the cartel of James Taggart,

Larkin, Mouch, et al., for the leering maw of cronyism and extortion that had underlain their limp

philanthropic rhetoric. Rand's conclusions regarding centrally planned economies are clear: the

looters' attempts to wrest from millions of individuals into a few fumbling hands a living machine

so vast and complex as the American economy inadvertently dismantles itself. Adam Smith's

“invisible hand”, a dizzying web of self-motivated but reciprocating actions, can indeed become

stuffed with enough legislation so as to render it visible as the benevolent hand of some People's

State. As Atlas Shrugged and the histories of almost any socialist regime tragically illustrate,

however, puppet strings can only maintain the illusion of control to certain lengths; after the

erosion of private incentive and personal responsibility, they can, at best, summon a uselessly

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flailing hand that sends coal-burnings engines to their destruction.

Rather than being prescriptive or coercive, Atlas Shrugged instructs that money is

fundamentally facilitative: it does not define some end towards which an individual's sense of

good should conform (that's the market-niche for advertisers). Rather, money serves as one's

most liquid (and thus innovative) form of commodity, in that it can be proportionally exchanged

towards virtually any end that its possessor sees fit. Money is akin to potential energy, capable of

actualizing one's personal ends. Its moral arithmetic is elegantly simple, adequate to unravel the

most glowing of collectivist exhortations: individuals should be free to devote themselves to

developing their assets, which they can exchange for money, a placeholder for yet-undefined

goods/services. To the greater extent that people pursue their self-interests, the more wealth is

ultimately created, and thus each individual's freedom to choose is expanded in turn.