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naddr1qq…7qurThe hatred of money represents the deepest philosophical confusion of our time, a confusion that reveals more about those who express it than about the nature of money itself. To understand why, we must first understand what money actually is, not what its detractors imagine it to be.
Money is stored choice. When a craftsman shapes wood into furniture, a programmer transforms logic into software, or a farmer coaxes wheat from soil, they create value that did not previously exist. Their effort, guided by knowledge and skill, increases the total wealth available to humanity. Money is simply the token that represents a claim on this created value in a form that can be stored and exchanged. It is a certificate of production, a transferable option on future goods, the physical symbol of the fact that someone, somewhere, made something that another person wanted enough to trade for. This is why money cannot be created by decree. Governments that print currency create only paper, not wealth. They redistribute claims on existing production through the hidden tax of inflation, but they cannot print the production itself. A million freshly printed dollars cannot conjure a single loaf of bread into existence. Only human effort directed by human minds can do that. Money divorced from production is merely colored paper, a counterfeit claim on wealth that was never created.
The implications cascade from this simple truth. If money represents production, then the accumulation of money represents the accumulation of past productive effort. The wealthy man, assuming he earned rather than stole his wealth, has created value for others on a grand scale. His bank account is a ledger of problems solved, desires satisfied, and efficiencies created. To damn him for his wealth is to damn him for his productivity, which is to say, for his virtue in creating what others valued enough to purchase.
But observe who damns money the loudest and longest. Is it those who produce? The engineer designing bridges rarely rails against money; he is too busy earning it through useful work. The merchant connecting buyers with sellers seldom denounces the medium of exchange that makes his service possible. The artist who creates beauty that others wish to purchase does not typically curse the mechanism by which he trades his creations for food and shelter.
No, the loudest critics of money are invariably those who seek it without earning it. The academic who produces papers nobody reads, funded by taxes extracted from those who do produce. The politician who promises to redistribute wealth he did not create to voters who did not earn it. The activist who demands resources for causes that generate no value anyone would voluntarily purchase. They hate money precisely because it is an objective measure of value created, and they create no value. Money exposes their parasitism simply by existing as an honest accounting of productive effort.
This is why such people invariably prefer systems of allocation other than voluntary exchange. They speak of "need" as if it were a claim on the productive effort of others. They invoke "fairness" to disguise their demand that those who produce should subsidize those who do not. They create elaborate theories of exploitation to explain why those who create value somehow owe it to those who create none.
But need is not a claim. That someone requires food does not obligate others to provide it. That someone desires healthcare does not create a right to the labor of doctors and nurses. Need is infinite; production is finite. The only just system is one where those who produce trade voluntarily with others who produce, each offering value in exchange for value. Money simply facilitates this exchange by providing a common medium and store of value across time.
The alternative to money is not some utopia where goods flow to each according to need. The alternative is either barter, which is merely less efficient money, or force, which is the destroyer of production itself. When men cannot trade peacefully using an agreed medium of exchange, they must either do without trade or take what they want through violence. History offers no third option.
This is why the stability of money matters so deeply. Inflation is not merely a technical economic problem; it is a form of theft that corrupts the very foundation of peaceful exchange. When governments debase currency, they steal from everyone who has saved, everyone who has produced value and stored it for future use. They punish virtue and reward vice, creating a society where spending immediately becomes rational because saving is punished. The productive are robbed to subsidize the profligate.
Sound money, by contrast, rewards the productive and the patient. Gold became money not by government decree but by market selection, chosen for its durability, divisibility, and scarcity. No amount of political will can create more gold; it must be found and extracted through effort. This is why governments abandoned gold: not because it was impractical, but because it limited their ability to steal through inflation. Fiat currency exists precisely to enable theft disguised as monetary policy.
The rise of Bitcoin represents the market's attempt to route around this theft. Like gold, Bitcoin cannot be created by decree; its supply schedule is fixed by protocol, not politics. Unlike gold, it can be transmitted electronically and stored without physical presence. It is money with scarcity enforced by mathematics rather than geology, resistant to counterfeiting or inflation by design. That governments and their academic apologists hate Bitcoin so intensely merely confirms that it serves its purpose.
But the hatred goes deeper than policy disputes. Those who hate money hate it because it reminds them of what they are not. Every transaction is a mirror reflecting their own lack of productive capacity. Every price tag is an indictment of their inability to create value others would voluntarily purchase. Money is the messenger they wish to kill because they dislike the message: that value must be created before it can be consumed, that production must precede consumption, that someone must make before anyone can take.
The irony is that these critics depend entirely on the productivity of those they condemn. The professor who denounces capitalism collects a salary made possible by capital accumulation. The politician who rails against the rich is paid from taxes only the productive can generate. The activist who demands redistribution lives on donations from those who earned what they gave. They are parasites condemning their hosts, unable to recognize that their very existence depends on the system they seek to destroy.
This is not to say that all inequality is justified or that all wealth is earned. Theft exists, both private and public. Governments grant monopolies, subsidize failures, and bail out the connected at the expense of the productive. But these are corruptions of money, not inherent features. They represent the introduction of force into what should be voluntary exchange, the replacement of market selection with political selection. The solution is not to abandon money but to protect it from such corruptions.
Money is amoral in the same way a hammer is amoral. It can be used to build or to destroy, but it has no moral agency of its own. What matters is how it is acquired and how it is used. Money earned through production and voluntary exchange is a badge of honor, proof that its holder created value for others. Money taken through force or fraud is stolen goods, no matter how many laws sanctify the theft.
The root of money is production. The root of production is the human mind applied to the transformation of resources into goods and services others value. The root of the human mind's productivity is freedom: the freedom to think, to choose, to act, to trade, to keep the fruits of one's labor. Money is thus the material expression of human freedom exercised productively over time.
Those who truly hate money hate human freedom, human productivity, and ultimately human life as it could and should be lived. They prefer a world where need is claim, where force replaces trade, where the productive are enslaved to the parasitic. They imagine themselves the beneficiaries of such a system, never its victims, forgetting that when production is punished, all starve equally except those who wield the guns.
The choice is not between money and some moneyless utopia. The choice is between voluntary exchange measured in honest money and involuntary servitude enforced by those who produce nothing but commands. As long as humans must produce to survive and benefit from trading with one another, money in some form will exist. The only question is whether it will be honest money that stores and transmits legitimate claims on production, or corrupted money that enables theft through inflation and confiscation.
Choose carefully, for a civilization that cannot distinguish between production and parasitism, between earning and taking, between honest money and counterfeit claims, has chosen its own destruction. The root of money is human virtue exercised productively. Those who damn money have damned themselves.
Max on Nostr: We live in a curious age. Never before have so many people enjoyed such material ...
We live in a curious age. Never before have so many people enjoyed such material abundance while simultaneously proclaiming their contempt for the very mechanism that makes this abundance possible. They drive automobiles purchased with money to universities funded by money where they learn from professors paid with money that money is the source of all human suffering. The contradiction is so glaring that it blinds them to its implications.