As left-wing populists gain momentum, we must remember the late author’s writings
OPINION —
Capitalism has done more to lift people en masse out of poverty and to enhance the lives of all of us than anything else has. DSA wants to destroy it.
Even conservative Sen. Ted Cruz wants to let the government intervene with the NIL money paid to college football players. He shouldn’t; government never makes things better than unfettered capitalism. We’ve come a long way: Ole Miss is paying quarterback Trinidad Chambliss $5 million. Money motivates. What else could make a black man fight on the side of the Rebels?
Many of the features of today’s crony politics and vilification of capitalism are foretold by Ayn Rand in her 1957 novel “Atlas Shrugged.” This 1,168-page doorstopper has inspired many of us and exposes the banality of Democratic Socialists’ class-envy rhetoric. I offer the following passage from “Atlas Shrugged” called ‘Francisco’s Money Speech.’
At a party, entrepreneur Francisco d’Anconia is confronted by a liberal interloper who indignantly murmurs, “Money is the root of all evil.”
“So you think that money is the root of all evil?” d’Anconia replies. “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 work, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the work 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?
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.
“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 that 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, the man of best judgment and highest ability — and the degree of a man’s productiveness is the degree of his reward. Is this what you consider evil?”
So, do not buy into the negative view of capitalism of leftists Hasan Piker, Ilhan Omar and Abdul El-Sayed, nor their revisionist history of the United States. Even on the 25th anniversary of 9/11, they tend to remember it differently, implying we deserved the attack and saying they lost good men that day: Moamar, Mohammed, Abdel, Ahmed, Hamza and Khalid. Great young people with a promising future, they say, who had just gotten their pilot’s licenses.
