Excellent article. I haven’t read the whole thing yet, but I will when I have time....
“Thus if you are not among the favored guests at the table where officials make detailed lists of who is to receive what at whose expense, you are on the menu.”
“Aristocracy of Pull”
“Then you will see the rise of the men of the double standardthe men who live by force, yet count on those who live by trade to create the value of their looted moneythe men who are the hitchhikers of virtue. In a moral society, these are the criminals, and the statutes are written to protect you against them. But when a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-lawmen who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victimsthen money becomes its creators’ avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they’ve passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter.
“Do you wish to know whether that day is coming? Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsionwhen you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothingwhen you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favorswhen you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against youwhen you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrificeyou may know that your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that is does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot.—Atlas Shrugged, an excerpt from Francisco D’Anconia’s money speech