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 lifeblood — 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 and 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.