You hold a gun in your hand. The gun is loaded. Is the gun evil, immoral, saintly,
good, or none of the above? I think everyone would agree that the gun has no
morality. That it doesn't make sense to give moral character to an inanimate
piece of machinery.
In the same sense, a disk of metal, a piece of paper, or the numbers in an account
have no morality. They are all amoral.
Therefore, any physical object money (POM) is also amoral. Any morality associated with money is a result of the use that one or more human beings makes of that money. The morality comes from the use of that money to motivate some other person's actions.
Money can be used to build hospitals to care for sick and dying children. Money can be used to create weapons of mass destruction. Money can be used for almost anything. There is nothing about money which prevents its use for evil purposes.
If money were not a physical object then it might possibly have some ethical content. One might be able to speak of money as being a moral force. But that could only be the case if money were not a POM and did not represent a POM.
As we brought to mind in the previous article "POM
Can Be Taken, Lost, Or Destroyed" there will be a temptation on the part
of virtually everyone to take money from others against their will by force or
fraud. This temptation is increased by the fact that money may furthermore be
used
to
motivate others to help one take people's money.
I
can
hire
(using money)
a lawyer
to
fraudulently sue other people. This compounding effect of POMs is only possible
because a POM is always amoral. If a POM were moral it could not be
used to reward
immoral
behavior. And if a POM were used only to motivate immoral behavior that POM would
be immoral.
Because physical object money is amoral, the power of those who possess or control
money to do harm is greatly increased. Look back over history at the most evil
actions: those historical events which were the actions of human beings harming
and destroying large numbers of other human beings. In every case, money is an
essential element of those tragedies. To use a traditional modern example, the
actions of the Nazi party in exterminating minorities in the 1930s and 1940s
were the actions of a bureaucracy paid by money. These horrific crimes
against humanity could not have been carried out if the secretaries, guards,
engineers,
construction crews, and police were not being paid money for their work. No one
would have manufactured the poison gas or built the death camps or kept the records
of who was a member of a minority marked for death or sought them out or done
any of the other work necessary to bring those innocent people to their deaths.
It was only possible because the economy used a POM and that POM was amoral.
Thus the sins that would be the minor sins of individuals become the major sins
of organizations with great power. The festering hatred of one diseased mind
becomes the national and even global tragedy of a world war. That is the exponential
multiplying
effect of money being amoral.
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Next: The Supply Of POM
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