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 the 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.
Money is the barometer of a society s virtue.
Money is so noble a medium that it does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. 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.