>
> Evo vam jos jedan pogled na Ameriku, puno bolji, bar ja mislim:
>
> Francisco's ``Money Speech''
>
> From Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand
>
> 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 recognitio 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, 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."
>
> Lep pozdrav,
> Kri
>
>