Ayn Rand — "When you see that money is exchanged for goods and services, not for favors and …"
When you see that money is exchanged for goods and services, not for favors and flattery, that your work is not a plea, but a demand, that no one can give you what you have not earned, and that no one can earn for you what you have not given, when you see that the men who get rich by conquest do so by force, and the men who get rich by trade do so by virtue, then you will know that money is the root of all good.
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Russian-American novelist (The Fountainhead, 1943; Atlas Shrugged, 1957) and Objectivist philosopher whose ethical egoism and capitalism-as-virtue shaped American libertarianism.
Closely associated with
Nathaniel Branden (her early Objectivist-movement collaborator and lover).
For an intellectual contrast, see
John Rawls, Harvard political philosopher (1921-2002) — Rawls's A Theory of Justice (1971) systematized exactly the egalitarian-redistributive liberalism Rand's Atlas Shrugged was structured to attack. Rand's 'sanction of the victim' and Rawls's 'veil of ignorance' are the two opposite founding intuitions of American political philosophy — selfish-flourishing-as-virtue vs fairness-from-original-position.
