money

Two things about money: I need it, and to get it, I need to write about it.

Between semesters at Grove City this summer, I worked nearly full time. It wasn't terrible, but I was tired. Too tired to do my other job: search for scholarships. My mom, intent on seeing me graduate without debt, got me signed up for an abundant feed of scholarships from a couple of websites promising free, easy, and not-so-easy money. But she signed me up with her email address, so she had to forward them to me as they came. And they came. Sometimes two or three at a time, every couple of days.

So she forwarded them to me, confidently assuming that I was filling them out in my spare time. Someone told me that she'd told them that I was working hard on scholarships, especially on one in particular... something about money.

Yeah. Money. The Ayn Rand Institute gives out thousands of dollars in scholarship money to the deserving poor. The catch is that being in the heritage of the matron saint of capitalism, they can't give away something for nothing. An essay is required in exchange. That way money doesn't fall into the hands of the moochers.

With a choice of three essay questions to answer, I read Atlas Shrugged early in the summer. It was good. Actually it was ugly. Ugly and Inspiring. It wreaked temporary havoc on my worldview and made me want to switch my major to business. I thought about it. I thought about the book, and about money, and a little about the essay questions. I chose the explanatory topic over the character comparisons. I'm bad at those.

"What is the difference between the man who wants to have money and the man who wants to make money?" Naturally this has to be answered with examples from the book. The book is one thousand, one hundred, and sixty-nine pages long. The deadline is the seventeenth of this month.

So what is the difference between the person who wants to have money and the person who wants to make money? Can money be made? Who wants to do that?

The man who wants to make money is the rational man whose grasp of reality causes him to act to make money through production while the man who wants to have money is the man who has divorced his mind from reality and wishes to have wealth without productive labor.

Before this answer makes any sense though, I suppose I should attempt to define or describe money.

Money is created only through the production of goods for trade. Even a natural resource can be extraced only through some rational productive process. Behind this process is the reason of man. So money, as Franciso d'Anconia says in Atlas Shrugged, is "the product of man's capacity to think." The rational man, recognizing that something can't come from nothing, makes money. The man who rejects rational thought embraces mysticism, divorcing existence from cause--he wants to have but not to make money.

So somehow money is the product of human rationality (this presupposes that self-interest and preservation are rational). And then I have a lot of quotes and I need to read for a biology quiz...