Sunday 24 April 2011

Money: The Red & The Black

In response to this assertion by commenter GunRights4US at John Venlet's post on the ethics of money...
"The root of evil is the LOVE of money, not merely the money itself."
... I made the following comment:
"Nonsense, and one reason it is nonsense is that it does not attend to the principles on which money is acquired through action.

What must be distinguished is money acquired through freely undertaken work (a subcategory of trade) from money acquired through the application of leveraged institutional force (e.g. in taxation via say, the bond “market”, which is a subcategory of theft).

Obtaining money in the latter way is an endoresement of evil, not the root of evil itself.

Obtaining money in the former way is an accruement of the moral authority necessary to pursue other values."
The difference between money acquired through trade (honest money) and money acquired through theft (dirty money) is crucial to what the "love" of money signifies - the love of honest money is a tremendous source of goodness, in that it signifies the application of creative effort to the end of improving the material and/or spiritual means with which people conduct their lives.

The love of dirty money signifies something else entirely...

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