Sep
14
2026

There's Never a Bad Time For It, In Fact

At the Daily Caller, Ron Hart opines: Now Is A Good Time For Ayn Rand’s ‘Money Speech’.

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?["]

Today's amazing Eye Candy is from 1974, after Gerry Ford's swearing in of Alan Greenspan as Chairman Of The Council Of Economic Advisors. And, yes, that's Ayn, and it looks like she's about to give Gerry a piece of her mind. Also: her husband Frank O'Connor and Alan's mom, Rose Goldsmith, with her back to the camera. (Ron's article is illustrated with a different photo of the same event.)

I am also a big fan of Francisco's money speech. I quoted from it here and (slightly modified) here, making fun of the "Future Leaders Institute" program put on by the University Near Here. You can (and should) read the whole speech right here.

Another excerpt:

“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.["]

I was never an Objectivist, I probably wouldn't pass their purity tests, I skipped over John Galt's soliloquy in Atlas Shrugged, but I think Francisco's "Money Speech" was the best thing Ayn Rand ever wrote.

Also of note:

  • It's a long way down. Becket Adams has plenty of examples of The Bottomless Demand for Stories of Israel’s Malevolence. Here's one of the latest:

    Just last week, Al Jazeera accused Israel not only of destroying the shade in Gaza but of “decreasing the amount of oxygen” in the region. The charge appeared during a so-called news report on Palestinian Arabs’ complaints about the summer weather.

    “The heat we’re experiencing is not natural,” AJ+’s Bisan Owda reported from a seaside refugee camp.

    “I can’t find a little bit of shade,” she said, standing against a tent in a tent city. “No shade at all. No shade at all. That’s the most, like, the most horrific thing that can turn this heat into hell on earth.”

    The August daily highs in Gaza this year were between 89 and 91 degrees Fahrenheit, according to Owda. For context, the August daily highs ran about 86 to 90 degrees in 2020, 88 to 93 in 2021, 87 to 93 in 2022, and 86 to 92 in 2023 — the year of the October 7 terrorist attacks.

    For additional context, that 89-to-91-degree range is a typical August high in Miami.

    “Actually,” Owda continued, “[the heat is] one of the catastrophic consequences of the equivalent of eight atomic bombs that Israel has dropped [during] the past three years on Gaza that destroyed buildings and trees, exceeding the [number] of sun exposure hours, decreasing the amount of oxygen and sources of shade, and increasing the amount of dust as well.”

    As a Twitter commenter puns: It's "Oxygenocide"!

  • And it's only three days late. Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. has The 9/11 Column You Haven’t Read Yet. (WSJ gifted link) He goes in an unexpected direction:

    A poorer country than the U.S. would have had to parcel out its resources more carefully in response to 9/11. Instead, the U.S. was distributing taxpayer checks to heiresses and hedge-fund managers because they happened to live in the vicinity of downtown.

    The fiscal debacle of 9/12, to me, would come to seem of a piece with the fiscal debacle of ObamaCare, the fiscal debacle of climate policy and, in crescendo fashion, our Covid response.

    Our globe-girdling society produces complex policy challenges. It has a hard time producing intelligent policy responses. In their place, we get bankrupting spending extravaganzas in which politicians demonstrate their caring by how much money they set on fire, facilitated by the accident of the world’s seemingly bottomless appetite for U.S. debt.

    Jefferson famously said if forced to choose between living without newspapers and living without government, he’d prefer the latter. But the press no longer plays the role he expected, policing government policy failure—say, by discovering that the Affordable Care Act produces insurance so unaffordable nobody would buy it without a subsidy, or that green-energy handouts reduce emissions only in an imaginary world where energy consumption is capped.

    Back in 2005, when this blog (and I) were young, I quoted Thomas Sowell:

    In the tragic vision, individual sufferings and social evils are inherent in the innate deficiencies of all human beings, whether those deficiencies are in knowledge, wisdom, morality, or courage. Moreover, the available resources are always inadequate to fulfill all the desires of all the people. Thus there are no "solutions" in the tragic vision, but only trade-offs that still leave many desires unfulfilled and much unhappiness in the world.

    It's tough to find any US politician, left or right, that will say something like that.