一人一世界金钱的意义(英文版)

2020年12月19日发(作者：彭耜)

The Meaning of Money
From Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand
Published in 1957


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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?
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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?
8 – 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?

“The Meaning of Money”
From Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand

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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?
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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?
11 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.
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man who respects it has earned it.
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approaching looter. So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another – their only
substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun.
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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.
15 – 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.
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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.
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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 arbitrary 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.'
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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.
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it's crumbling around you, while you're 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,

“The Meaning of Money”
From Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand

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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
aristocrats of the bureau, and despised the producers, as slaves, as traders, as shopkeepers – as industrialists.
20 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.
21 – 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.
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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, 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.
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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.
Original source: Part II, Section 2, pages 387-391 of the paperback edition of
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Rand.
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Text courtesy of James Donald