Do Not Let It Go

For many years now I have been fascinated by the implication of the list:  reason, justice, freedom, production, and achievement.  Not because they contain some revealed truth, but just the opposite.  They simply organize a natural relationship of concepts that are essential to not only revitalizing what America’s Founders had started, but in surpassing them in the realization of the promise in those words.

Where did this list come from?  It was articulated in Francisco’s Money Speech in Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged.  The speech was a response to the false assertion that money is the root of all evil.  Relevant to the purpose of this blog and this list of words, Francisco responds: 

You stand in the midst of the greatest achievements of the greatest productive civilization and you wonder why 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, money was always seized by looters of one brand or another, whose names changed, 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.

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. [Ayn Rand, “Francisco’s Money Speech,” Atlas Shrugged; via AltasShrugged.tv]

Image Source:  AtlasShrugged.tv

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