On the Way to Socialism

When a society establishes criminal-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 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 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 bounces, 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 land 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.

Francisco d’Anconia, in “Atlas Shrugged,” by Ayn Rand