January 20th, 2007: Great Expectations

This is my final post. Perhaps the 2-week pause since my previous post was a function of some subconscious ambivalence about ending this blog. To be sure, it isn't something I'm 100% sure about; I'd be lying if I said that there weren't some times -- especially when I read encouraging comments or emails from readers -- that I think to myself "man, this has really been a gratifying experience...such a shame to call it quits..." I've certainly got some forces pulling me in the other direction, but unlike the previous times when I contemplated wrapping things up, I feel relatively at peace with the decision this time around.

Will this page be updated in the future? I don't want to close the door on it completely; I plan on playing in several WSOP events this summer, which I'm sure will provide me with some interesting stories that I might post about, but in the interest of closure, I won't get ahead of myself. Time marches on, and I'm happy to have had these experiences, but the timing is simply right to draw the curtain, so for all intents and purposes, let's say our goodbyes now.

My Australian sojourn has drawn to a close; I left just as their incredible summer was starting to roll in, and came back to North America…settling into another lovely Toronto January. I hated to leave Australia just as I felt like I was starting to put down roots and make good friends, but I left happy, content in the knowledge that I really made a lot of these past few months. A few weeks ago I made it out to the Great Barrier Reef, which was one of the places I really didn’t want to miss before I left. A Dutch friend and I took a 3-day sailing cruise out to some of the Whitsunday Islands, many of which really have to be seen to be believed. There’s a beach called Whitehaven that is easily the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen – I’d heard that it was a nice beach, but I thought to myself “yeah, whatever, I’ve seen plenty of nice beaches before – heck, I live on Bondi Beach, one of the most famous in Australia; white sand, blue sky, I get it...yawn.” Whitehaven shattered every last skeptical bone in my body. I want to post a picture here, but a) I still haven’t uploaded them to my computer, and b) I’m worried it still wouldn’t do it justice. Because the reef is so shallow, the sheer number of greens and blues in the water is astounding. And the sand, wow. It’s like talcum powder under your feet. And white. Not that sandboxy yellowish-white that you see on the nicer beaches of Miami and Hawaii. This is white-white: the color of the undershirts in a Downy commercial. And to top it off, the island is uninhabited, so there are never more than 40 or so people on this expansive beach at any one time. Complete silence, except for the tide rolling in. Mindblowing. (Alright, I found a picture of it online, but I’m going to give the caveat that as nice as it looks below, the picture still doesn’t do it justice.)




My entire Australian experience really got me thinking seriously about age, which is a topic that I’ve addressed in passing a couple times, but I haven’t quite given it the treatment it deserves. First off, in nearly every country in the world not in North America, law school isn’t a graduate program, but rather an intensive undergraduate program, so the final year law students in my classes down there were mostly much younger than me…typically 22 to 24. There were a handful in my age range: 26-27, but I was among the older students, even though I probably look a little younger than I am (not to mention that I act like an 18-year old), so I never really felt out of place.

Among the 25 sailing guests on our boat cruising the Whitsunday islands, most fit into one of a few identifiable categories:

i. College students (19 – 21 years old)

ii. Recent college graduates either traveling before their jobs began, or taking their first vacation, or traveling after having just left their first job out of college (22 – 24 years old)

iii. A few older guests, usually couples (30 – 38)

You know what there weren’t any of?? 25-to-30 year olds who were traveling for no other reasons than that they possessed the inclination, the opportunity, and the ability to do so. Oh wait, scratch that. There was one. Me. In many ways, our little sailing trip was a microcosm of the frustration I often feel that I meet so few other similarly-situated individuals…on the one hand I feel incredibly blessed that I’m able to take these great trips at a relatively young age, and yet I’m equally frustrated that it sometimes feels that I’m the outcast, even though I’m doing exactly what seemingly everyone else my age professes to want to do. I find it a source of endless frustration that so many people let their age – which comes down to nothing more than a digit on a birth certificate – dictate their life decisions.

Isn’t the theoretical permutation of the issue the following: in a true vacuum, would individuals naturally gravitate toward the same pattern of expectations associated with one’s age that our culture currently subscribes to, or is it merely a function of our society’s historical development. I guess what I’m trying to get at is whether there’s anything “magical” about why we assign certain expectations to the ages of 20, 25, 30, and so on, or whether perhaps it’s nothing more than a relic from times gone past: a self-perpetuating set of expectations that might merit reconsideration for ‘modern times.’

Apologies if the previous paragraph seems a tad esoteric…I’m still ploughing through Atlas Shrugged, which is undoubtedly rendering my writing abstract. In fact, let me just restate it in the simplest possible terms, since I think it’s a pretty straightforward inquiry, and an important one at that. Here goes >> Our society has come to expect certain accomplishments or life milestones by certain ages…graduation from high school in the late teens, and then graduation from college in one’s early twenties, first job soon thereafter, marriage in the mid-to-late twenties, children between 25 and 40, progressing to middle- and then upper-management by age X (depending on profession) etc, etc, etc. I’m sure that I’ve railed against these preordained sets of expectations in prior posts, so all I’m asking now is whether there’s anything “real” about them, or whether they’re merely the product of (antiquated?) custom. I mean, besides menopause (something I’d consider a “real” constraint; e.g. women need to have their kids before around 41 or so), and a couple other ‘non-negotiables’ (such as graduation from high school) it’s really quite surprising how much life “we have to work with”, and yet how stubbornly rigid our society is in perpetuating a certain set of expectations for us as we reach certain ages. I don't want to be the guy shouting into the wind; I'm not suggesting any massive paradigm shift...just something that my experiences to date have got me thinking about to an ever-greater degree.

Anyway, I am currently studying for the New York bar exam -- a place I really didn't think I'd be when I took my leave of absence from law school a couple years ago (and doubly ironic because I don't even live in the US.) I think back to the meeting I had with the dean of students when I told him that I wanted to leave school; I remember walking down the street afterward relatively secure in that decision, and truth be told, I thought it more likely than not (maybe 60%) that I wouldn't be returning at all. But I don't for one second regret returning to school, nor completing my degree. I couldn't even count how many times I've been asked in recent years what kind of law I want to practice, which I always answer by saying that I don't really want to practice law at all, which inevitably draws an incredulous response along the lines of: "Wait a minute -- you're in law school, but you don't want to be a lawyer!??" Yes, that is correct. I don't. But I can't think of any way I would have rather spent the previous three years: I met some of the best friends I've ever made, and with whom I had an absolute ball. It was intellectually stimulating and challenging, even when I was having doubts about how it would contribute to my eventual career. And maybe most important of all, it allowed me to discover poker -- an odd thing to say, I know, but I think one of the reasons that poker in North America is becoming increasingly dominated by the 25-year-old and under set is that it's that age bracket that really had the disposable time to devote themselves to reading, learning, and practicing (read: playing hundreds of thousands, and even millions of hands.) I'm grateful to have discovered the game while I was in a position to really indulge my passion for it, a rather unique opportunity, which I'm not sure would have come along later in life. I don't think there's any one sentence, nor paragraph, that can possibly sum up the past few years of my life, other than to say that it's all in the pages of this blog -- the veritable life cycle of a poker player, from my initiation into the online game, to my progression up through the stakes, and all the accompanying psychological states and insecurities. Perhaps what I'm most grateful for is having developed over the past year or two what I felt to be a great balance between school, work, travel, leisure, and poker; an equilibrium that's about to change dramatically, of course.

While I say I don't want to practice law at this point in time, who's to say how I'll feel about things 5 or 10 years from now. I'm sure a day will come when I'll be happy that I'm an actual lawyer and not just a law school graduate. Besides, if I don't study for and take this exam now while the general workings of the law are still relatively fresh in my mind, I doubt I'll ever come back to it later in life, and if I do, it will pose quite a formidable challenge. You ever come to a decision point in life and your instinct simply tells you that one option is the "right" one? Well this is one of those for me >>> I simply know that studying for and taking the bar exam is the right call. So I'm gritting my teeth for the next 7 weeks to take care of business. (Sidebar: in fact, there is one aspect of the law that I happen to find fascinating -- I really mean it: I follow this stuff for fun >> Google has been on the receiving end of dozens of lawsuits recently because of its practice of selling "keywords" to corporate competitors. Basically what's going on is this: Nike can "purchase" the search term "Reebok", so that any time somebody Googles "Reebok", a banner ad for Nike is displayed alongside the search results. Reebok cries trademark infringement. There's just one problem: Nike isn't actually using the trademarked term. All they've done is contractually agreed with private company Google that any time the user searches for Reebok, an ad for Nike shoes will be displayed. And there's no risk of "consumer confusion" here...all users see is an ad for Nike shoes...it's not Nike passing off their goods as someone else's. There are actually a number if very interesting legal questions here including (i) whether Nike is using the term "in commerce" (a requirement for a finding of trademark infringement), and (ii) whether Google is even the right party the plaintiff should be suing...after all, it's Nike that's making use of the trademarked term, not Google >> they're really just facilitating it. Of course, this isn't really an issue in my hypothetical example of Nike vs. Reebok because both Google and Nike have deep pockets to satisfy a multi-million dollar judgment. BUT, in reality, there are a lot of big corporations who claim that little mom & pop operations are inappropriately buying trademarked search terms through Google's keyword sales...so the big corporations think to themselves "gee, even though it's the little mom + pop shop that's infringing our trademark, let's go after Google and the keyword sales program itself because they've got the deepest pockets for a potential settlement, etc." Anyway, I don't know how I got off on this track, but I really do find that area of internet law fascinating...because it's so new and completely unsettled. So I've been making some overtures to Google (and their legal department) and some IP law firms who work on these types of cases. If anyone out there has any connections they think might be of interest to me, I'm all ears :)

But I digress. Between the time that I'm putting into study, and the Neteller bombshell that dropped the other day, this also seems like a rather opportune (and perhaps necessary) time to scale back on poker. As a bit of a "last hoorah" I went to Atlantic City last week for a couple days of poker, and played something like 30 out of the 48 hours I was in town. FWIW, I absolutely crushed the 5/10NL game there (to another commenter who asked about why I didn't post much anymore about my online results...well, I guess I simply don't find that aspect of the game all that interesting to talk about; there's an ample supply of such braggery in the 2+2 BBV forum; just didn't want to cast my lot in with those yahoos, even if reading that forum is a favorite guilty pleasure of mine.) One comment about playing NL live: It's absolute cake (easy to say, I guess, when you clean up.) I played a little scared for the first hour before realizing that out of 9 opponents, at least 7 of them had absolutely no clue what they were doing post-flop, and you could read them like the Sunday Times. It wasn't so much about picking up on tells but rather simply betting pattern/sizing -- (digression: God, how I love the inexhaustible supply of Bridge & Tunnel trash who fancy themselves good poker players because they can, quote, "read people" well, not realizing that this is a game of math, not perception.) No one wanted to get caught making ill-advised bluffs (or worse: calldowns), so it was remarkably easy to bully people out of pots when scare cards hit, and easier still to get out of their way when they picked up a monster. In 30 hours at the table, I can count on the fingers of one hand the times when I saw anyone make anything that could be classified as a real "move". Anyway, that marathon session really sapped the poker lifeblood from me, at least for a week or two, so I feel a little more comfortable eschewing the felt in favor of bar study.

So I guess this is it. Do I have any remaining words of wisdom culled from these past few years?

Well, it's funny: I try to compare the state of my life as a 21-year old finishing my undergraduate studies, and a 27-year old graduating from law school, each experience being accompanied by a certain degree of uncertainty about the future. But there are differences, too. At 21, I had hooked up with my fair share of girls, but I didn't know the first thing about dating or relationships. I had plenty of friends, but I didn't know anything about actually socializing. I'd held down a number of jobs, but I didn't know squat about working. At 21, I knew absolutely jack-shit. At 27, I still know jack-shit, but I know that I know jack-shit. Do you follow? In the 5 intervening years, I accrued experience and humulity at approximately the same rate. Keep an open mind.

Let me close with a brief story. One of my passions has always been comedy. No particular aspect of it; I just love the science of it. I love a good sitcom, old-school Marx Bros. movies, good stand-up (I even tried my hand at it a few times, which was a real rush), well-timed sarcasm, pregnant comedic pauses, stinging satire, snappy comebacks to stupid questions, and so on. I used to think that my dream job would be as a writer for The Daily Show, or some other smart comedy. Anyway, it just so happened that the executive in charge of original programming at Comedy Central is a graduate of my alma mater, so I used the alumni network to look her up, and send her a few letters asking if she might spare a few minutes to talk to me over the phone about work in the industry. (This was during my first year of law school, when I was just starting to get disillusioned with the whole enterprise.) I sent her a couple emails, and a letter by post, but got no response for over a month, so I figured they hadn’t reached or, or she was simply too busy to grant me an audience. So I forgot about it for a while. Then a couple weeks later, just out of the blue, she called me, catching me very off-guard, since I had more or less written her off. Because I was a little flustered, I bumbled awkwardly through some generic questions and answers, until we started talking about my ongoing law school education. In filling a bit of a prolonged pause, I lobbed her a softball, asking her what she thought of law school, and whether it could help in her line of work, expecting the standard “well, a law degree is so versatile, it would certainly prove advantageous no matter what field…blah, blah blah” response. But her firm and bleak answer took me by surprise.

“No,” she offered flatly.
“Oh…” I replied, somewhat caught off-guard.
“Well,” she continued “I just don’t really see what use a law degree would be in the field of comedy. I mean, I guess if you were going to work on artists’ contracts, or something, but that’s work for the law firms…doesn’t really have much to do with what we do here at Comedy Central.”

She didn’t speak with any reproach, and didn't intend her comments as a rebuke of any kind, but that’s exactly what it felt like to me. It was like an indictment of everything I was brought up to believe: that if you just study and work hard, everything else will take care of itself. That may indeed be a prescription for a life free of overt hardship, but I think it very far from a recipe for life fulfillment.

‘Of course law didn’t have anything to do with comedy,’ I thought (in many ways, it’s the complete antithesis!). ‘What on Earth could lead anyone to think otherwise?!??’

Her comments stung a little, but also carried with them a very important message; one that I had largely repressed until that time, but whose authenticity was undeniable: You are in control, nobody else. Deceptively simple, but it’s a message that has informed nearly every decision I’ve made in the past few years. Would you rather be playing poker than attending but ignoring a law school lecture? Then LEAVE, you’re not nailed down to the seat. Want to travel? Buy that plane ticket. Want to work on interesting projects? Well, you can interview for a position at a law firm and hope some interesting work finds its way across your desk once every couple of years, or you can decide what you want to work on and go seek it out. People love to come up with reasons why it’s not a great time to take a vacation, but you know what: if you wait until everything in your life is absolutely perfect before you take that trip/buy that house/talk to that girl/get in shape/have a baby, well, you’ll wake up old and wrinkled one day and wonder where it was you made a wrong turn. And maybe, just maybe you’ll come to the depressing conclusion that it wasn’t a wrong turn you took anywhere along the way, but rather it was your reluctance to make any turn at all. To cite a dumb and cliched example, I have never: N-E-V-E-R, not ONCE, regretted approaching a girl even when (as was the case all-too-often) she simply wasn’t interested in me, but man-oh-man I can recount with stunning accuracy the dozens of times when I was just too riddled with “what if I fail / look like a jackass” nerves to even open my mouth.

You can passively wait for knowledge and experience to wash over you, but that’s just about the least efficient way to go about things. Who you are and who you become is determined by the decisions you make and the actions you take. One of the somewhat-ironic realizations that I’ve had in keeping this blog is that we can’t merely think our way to happiness or fulfillment; so many of my blog posts have lamented the fact that I seem to continuously present problems and frustrations, and frame their parameters, but rarely do I approach an actual solution. But that’s what life is: more questions than answers. I used to love the somewhat-juvenile expression “Do it for the story!” While perhaps a tad elementary, I think it stands for the proposition that ultimately we are all destined to grow older, and eventually get very sick and die. One day we will all be elderly, shrunken shells of our former selves, devoid of the charisma, beauty, and intelligence that once defined us, and all that will be left to distinguish us from the other aging men and women on the planet are the experiences that we have accumulated, and the stories we’re able to share with a younger generation. I’m fiercely proud, content, and spiritually fulfilled with how I’ve spent the last few years of my life, and I’d like to think it’s a blueprint, of sorts, for how I might seek out similar degrees of satisfaction in other domains of my life going forward, even if/when I leave poker behind in favor of other life pursuits. Thanks for reading.

Friday, January 5th: Ayn Rand on Money

Welcome to my penultimate post. And it's a bit of a copout post at that because it consists nearly entirely of an extract from Ayn Rand's epic novel Atlas Shrugged, but it's one that discusses money and resonates with me more than nearly any other passage I've read on the topic. I ask for a little leeway just this one, since I've been trying to put my more original thoughts into a post that I'll make within a week that will be my last.

You don't need much background info about the plot to appreciate this passage, but in short, the book (to the point I've reached, at least) is a story set in Depression-era America, where a few ambitious industrial visionaries are finding themselves increasingly under attack from a set of lecherous but politically-connected "boys club"-types (both in industry and in government)...the type of people who have achieved their high posts in business and politics as a result of family lineage and political favor, but who have no real business savvy, and have made a living off of riding the coattails of the "real" industrial trailblazers. (Yes, there's several more plot elements later on, but this isn't a book report -- it's just a smide of background info so that you can appreciate the following passage with a little bit of context.)

Anyhow, this scene takes place at a wedding party. Francisco is apparently one of the few genuine industrial visionaries (I say "apparently" because his character is complicated, and I anticipate quite a few twists with him later as I keep reading, but that's not important for now), and gives the following oration to a group which consists of the business-"leeches" and their spouses/friends. One of the "leeches" remarks how "money is the root of all evil", and Francisco takes issue with it. I've taken the liberty of highliting in bold a few parts that resonate particularly well with me, but feel free to read it with an open-mind. All I ask is that you not get turned off by the somewhat philosophical style of the speech / make a mental effort to commit yourself to the passage, and I think you'll find it worthwhile -- for me it felt a bit like a hurricane slowly gathering strength as it passed over the ocean...I found the speech's forcefulness really gathered strength as it went on.

From ATLAS SHRUGGED, by Ayn Rand, page 387:

Rearden heard Bertram Scudder, outside the group, say to a girl who made some sound of indignation, "Don't let him disturb you. You know, money is the root of all evil—and he's the typical product of money."

Rearden did not think that Francisco could have heard it, but he saw Francisco turning to them with a gravely courteous smile.

"So you think that money is the root of all evil?" said Francisco d'Aconia. "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?

"When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others. It is not the moochers or the looters who give value to money. Not an ocean of tears nor all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive tomorrow. Those pieces of paper, which should have been gold, are a token of honor— your claim upon the energy of the men who produce. Your wallet is your statement of hope that somewhere in the world around you there are men who will not default on that moral principle which is the root of money. Is this what you consider evil?

"Have you ever looked for the root of production? Take a look at an electric generator and dare tell yourself that it was created by the muscular effort of unthinking brutes. Try to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by men who had to discover it for the first time. Try to obtain your food by means of nothing but physical motions—and you'll learn that man's mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth.

"But you say that money is made by the strong at the expense of the weak? What strength do you mean? It is not the strength of guns or muscles. Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. Then is money made by the man who invents a motor at the expense of those who did not invent it? Is money made by the intelligent at the expense of the fools? By the able at the expense of the incompetent? By the ambitious at the expense of the lazy? Money is MADE—before it can be looted or mooched—made by the effort of every honest man, each to the extent of his ability. An honest man is one who knows that he can't consume more than he has produced.

"To trade by means of money is the code of the men of good will. Money rests on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and his effort. Money allows no power to prescribe the value of your effort except by the voluntary choice of the man who is willing to trade you his effort in return. Money permits you to obtain for your goods and your labor that which they are worth to the men who buy them, but no more. Money permits no deals except those to mutual benefit by the unforced judgment of the traders. Money demands of you the recognition that men must work for their own benefit, not for their own injury, for their gain, not their loss—the recognition that they are not beasts of burden, born to carry the weight of your misery—that you must offer them values, not wounds—that the common bond among men is not the exchange of suffering, but the exchange of GOODS. Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men's stupidity, but your talent to their reason; it demands that you buy, not the shoddiest they offer, but the best your money can find. And when men live by trade—with reason, not force, as their final arbiter—it is the best product that wins, the best performance, then man of best judgment and highest ability—and the degree of a man's productiveness is the degree of his reward. This is the code of existence whose tool and symbol is money. Is this what you consider evil?

"But money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver. It will give you the means for the satisfaction of your desires, but it will not provide you with desires. Money is the scourge of the men who attempt to reverse the law of causality—the men who seek to replace the mind by seizing the products of the mind.

"Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he wants; money will not give him a code of values, if he's evaded the knowledge of what to value, and it will not provide him with a purpose, if he's evaded the choice of what to seek. Money will not buy intelligence for the fool, or admiration for the coward, or respect for the incompetent. The man who attempts to purchase the brains of his superiors to serve him, with his money replacing his judgment, ends up by becoming the victim of his inferiors. The men of intelligence desert him, but the cheats and the frauds come flocking to him, drawn by a law which he has not discovered: that no man may be smaller than his money. Is this the reason why you call it evil?

"Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth— the man who would make his own fortune no matter where he started. If an heir is equal to his money, it serves him; if not, it destroys him. But you look on and you cry that money corrupted him. Did it? Or did he corrupt his money? Do not envy a worthless heir; his wealth is not yours and you would have done no better with it. Do not think that it should have been distributed among you; loading the world with fifty parasites instead of one, would not bring back the dead virtue which was the fortune. Money is a living power that dies without its root. Money will not serve that mind that cannot match it. Is this the reason why you call it evil?

"Money is your means of survival. The verdict which you pronounce upon the source of your livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon your life. If the source is corrupt, you have damned your own existence. Did you get your money by fraud? By pandering to men's vices or men's stupidity? By catering to fools, in the hope of getting more than your ability deserves? By lowering your standards? By doing work you despise for purchasers you scorn? If so, then your money will not give you a moment's or a penny's worth of joy. Then all the things you buy will become, not a tribute to you, but a reproach; not an achievement, but a reminder of shame. Then you'll scream that money is evil. Evil, because it would not pinch-hit for your self-respect? Evil, because it would not let you enjoy your depravity? Is this the root of your hatred of money?

"Money will always remain an effect and refuse to replace you as the cause. Money is the product of virtue, but it will not give you virtue and it will not redeem your vices. Money will not give you the unearned, neither in matter nor in spirit. Is this the root of your hatred of money?

"Or did you say it's the LOVE of money that's the root of all evil? To love a thing is to know and love its nature. To love money is to know and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the effort of the best among men. It's the person who would sell his soul for a nickel, who is the loudest in proclaiming his hatred of money—and he has good reason to hate it. The lovers of money are willing to work for it. They know they are able to deserve it."

"Let me give you a tip on a clue to men's characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it.

"Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter. So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another—their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun.

"But money demands of you the highest virtues, if you wish to make it or to keep it. Men who have no courage, pride, or self-esteem, men who have no moral sense of their right to their money and are not willing to defend it as they defend their life, men who apologize for being rich—will not remain rich for long. They are the natural bait for the swarms of looters that stay under rocks for centuries, but come crawling out at the first smell of a man who begs to be forgiven for the guilt of owning wealth. They will hasten to relieve him of the guilt—and of his life, as he deserves.

"Then you will see the rise of the double standard—the men who live by force, yet count on those who live by trade to create the value of their looted money—the 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-law—men who use force to seize the wealth of DISARMED victims—then 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 compulsion—when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing—when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors—when 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 you—when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice—you may know that your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that it 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.

"Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men's protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it becomes, marked: 'Account overdrawn.'

"When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask, 'Who is destroying the world?' You are.

"You stand in the midst of the greatest achievements of the greatest productive civilization and you wonder why it's crumbling around you, while your 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, 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.

"To the glory of mankind, there was, for the first and only time in history, a COUNTRY OF MONEY—and I have no higher, more reverent tribute to pay to America, for this means: a country of reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement. For the first time, man's mind and money were set free, and there were no fortunes-by-conquest, but only fortunes-by-work, and instead of swordsmen and slaves, there appeared the real maker of wealth, the greatest worker, the highest type of human being—the self-made man—the American industrialist.

"If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose—because it contains all the others—the fact that they were the people who created the phrase 'to MAKE money.' No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity—to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted, or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created. The words 'to make money' hold the essence of human morality.

"Yet these were the words for which Americans were denounced by the rotted cultures of the looters' continents. Now the looters' credo has brought you to regard your proudest achievements as a hallmark of shame, your prosperity as guilt, your greatest men, the industrialists, as blackguards, and your magnificent factories as the product and property of muscular labor, the labor of whip-driven slaves, like the pyramids of Egypt. The rotter who simpers that he sees no difference between the power of the dollar and the power of the whip, ought to learn the difference on his own hide-as, I think, he will.

"Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men. Blood, whips and guns—or dollars. Take your choice—there is no other—and your time is running out."

>>>I'm not even going to attempt any analysis of the above...nor am I sure how qualified I am to pursue such an undertaking, so I'll just let you form your own opinions and conclusions. What resonated most with me? I really enjoyed the paragraph about not envying a "worthless heir"...in fact, I think it parallels the concept I've mentioned a couple times that leads multi-million dollar PowerBall lottery winners to squander their newfound fortunes and find themselves living hand-to-mouth just a year or two after their "big score." I loved the assertion that the only man "fit" to inherit wealth is the man who would make his own fortune no matter where he started, which is an idea that I think I was nipping at the outskirts of in my "Trust Fund Babies" post (linked to in the Top Ten post I made last week.) I asked just what the difference was between an individual who was wealthy as a result of a "windfall" inheritance, and a successful poker player (who some might 'accuse', as they would the wealthy heir, as having accumulated his money without 'earning' it, at least in the traditional sense, requiring "hard work", either physical or intellectual.) While I know that ending this post here leaves that question relatively "open", I think the preceding passage nonetheless informs our consideration of the issue. And it's late and I need some sleep...