"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."

Besides, wealth is often demonized by egalitarians. They see its distribution as a random function of the universe, and not as a function of the productive efforts of the earners. For one person to have more money than another is considered unjust. We hear so much about how the wealthy are evil, it is nice for a different point of view to be aired every now and then.

>"The saddest thing I've ever heard was from a friend who told me that his main goal in life was making money"

It would not be so sad if he said that his goal was producing something of value, which often results in making money. As Ayn says, "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".

> "Are people impressed by that article because of the sonorous prose?"

Yes, I do think the prose is quite nice. When Ayn hits a good stride, she reaches a style that is all her own. I think her talents are often under-appreciated because the literary establishment is very much opposed to her political views.

If one's goal is to maximize the value humanity creates, she should probably become an elementary school teacher. If one's goal is to make money, she should get an MBA or financial degree.

The former, to me, is significantly nobler.

Since that is obviously the worst of all worlds, it tells me that teachers do a good thing, but not the greatest thing.

However, without teachers, few things would get done as everyone would reinvent the wheel. This is also, while not the worst scenario, it is far from the best.

Thus, the best scenario seems to be that people should try to accomplish something, then go back and teach the next generation. The bonus is that these people will know how to get to the top.

However, people who are good at getting things done are not necessarily the best teachers, and for the people that are...

Perhaps, like we have today, those who are good at teaching and want to should teach, and those who want to produce should produce (and then later teach). The whole system relies on there being a good balance between the two. How to calculate the balance is very hard.

Also worth pointing out that this isn't necessarily true for secondary education - Universities are institutions which allow great teachers to both do great work and teach. I'd hypothesize that if the same were extended to other institutions, and also to younger students, much value would come of it.

As a side note, this approach made him richer, too.

"significantly nobler" is a means-nothing phrase. Nobility as a word is meaningless without backup. I would argue, to counter your point, that Steve Jobs has inspired more people to create beautiful, meaningful things than most teachers ever do. Teachers serve a purpose, but theirs is not the only noble trade in the world.

I come from a semi well off family on my father's side and have many well off friends. We all have either trust funds (family trusts) or our parents and grandparents just give us the money outright before they die or we get non-voting shares in our parents holding corporations that own 99% of the company or we get physical gold and silver before they pass.

The list goes on and on. The only people I have ever heard paying real inheritance tax were from the middle class. Rich enough to tax, poor enough to lack a good tax attorney.

There is no real way you can stop it. Even if you prevent parents from giving money to their children (!) then the rich can just turn it into gold chains and give them gifts of jewelry, or turn their wealth into priceless art and then give it to their children, or offshore bank accounts co-owned by father-son.

Her heroes, herself and her argument is that there shouldn't be a conflict between the material and the spiritual in the first place --- i.e. the 'ideal spiritual being' (in her literature) is the creator and individual of independent thought, for whom money is 'merely' the 'material manifestation of their spiritual height', a spirit that is, unlike others, admittedly celebrating this-life on this-world (not an otherworldly afterlife), 'reason' (she defines it for herself and her story characters, agreeing or disagreeing with that one is a different matter) and 'rational choice'.

While we're at it, when she's advocating 'rational selfishness', she's also not advocating the 'mindless brute going over corpses or a plundering thug' but rather implies that ultimately it is in your self-interest to create, and the best and most useful you can, then trade that voluntarily. This is pretty consistent with the YC/PG idea of wealth creation where ideally in the marketplace (except maybe for crass bubble markets) you make a lot of money most likely when you create even more wealth/value for those who choose to pay you. (Whether that's freemium subscribers, advertisers or a big corp buying you is beside the point of the argument -- in the end, the principle applies regardless of that.)

So I think the 'pitiable individual' you had in mind and the one she had in mind might well be the same or very similar --- there's unthinking zealots (MBA or not ;) who strive for money not knowing what to use it for, deal in personal connections and think it's all about 'striking deals with the right buddies' --- and then there's what in the 30s were 'the great industrialists' who started from nowhere (or since the 70s started in garages) and had a grand vision of something immensely useful they wanted to see in the world, then went ahead 'against all odds' to build it. Of course, she's using the heroism rhetoric of old warrior tales immensely, and I think she just did it for fun and maybe because her heroes (in books and real life) needed that 'missionary sense of urgency' to actually do what they set out to do.

Maybe for insanely great stuff you do actually need a reality distortion field. Although in another way she was all about 'facing, not blanking out reality and seeing it in the eye all the time'. But thats physical reality and basic laws like you cannot consume more than you produce etc. I'd actually say, to ultimately disrupt and reshape reality, you need to distort it first. Some of reality is ours to reshape, but that doesnt mean wishing-will-it-so.

Hmm. Mindboggling. There was a time when I could express such thoughts less confusingly. Guess I've been working too much lately and not doing enough intellectual reading/talking/writing. Gotta take that daily bike-ride now before getting to work -- laters!

As for making money, this is how our success is measured. Yes, you can do things for your soul, of for your friends, or for your family or for the society at large, but to be an entrepreneur means to accept to be judged, indeed, to judge yourself by your material success: money. It is not an easy thing to do. Money does not lie to you, does not tell you you're ok as you are now, that things will be better or that it will love you no matter what. Failure is clear to see, and so is success.

I probably needn't say it, but all this is worthless if you do not apply complete honesty to your work. Money is not an end in itself, it is the measure of your skill. To steal or cheat in any way makes it useless for this purpose.

The urge to create things is very spiritual for me, just fwiw. It doesn't have to be material things either - these days it's mostly software and occasionally robots, and in the past it's been mathematics and music. But I must create things - it's a fundamental part of the person I am.

Fortunately, I am learning to hack my personality to drive myself to do what I want. For example, I surround myself with creative people and I work on team projects where a sense of duty will drive me to do good work. But it is hard, and I must trick myself to do what I desire.

No it is not. I love HN, but most people here accept the distorted definition of a hacker.

Hacker culture had nothing to do with money, only lately, and PG is partially guilty of this, "hacker" started to associate with "21 year old internet millionaire" in the minds of many.

But I've been very explicit about this question:

"Great programmers are sometimes said to be indifferent to money. This isn't quite true. It is true that all they really care about is doing interesting work. But if you make enough money, you get to work on whatever you want, and for that reason hackers are attracted by the idea of making really large amounts of money. But as long as they still have to show up for work every day, they care more about what they do there than how much they get paid for it."

(http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html)

"So no, there's nothing particularly grand about making money. That's not what makes startups worth the trouble. What's important about startups is the speed. By compressing the dull but necessary task of making a living into the smallest possible time, you show respect for life, and there is something grand about that."

(http://www.paulgraham.com/startuplessons.html)

http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html

The relevant section is called "Two Routes." Linus seems to have taken organic route, gradually arranging his life so he could spend more time on Linux. Startups are usually an instance of the other strategy, the two-job route, of which they are the most extreme form.

(For a few very lucky people, a startup can also be one's life's work. But it's usually all one can do to make a startup succeed without also satisfying that constraint.)

Both making a lot of money and doing a "seriously successful" open source project are pretty rare, so even if the two are independent, you shouldn't expect many people to succeed at both of them.

I think that hackers, however, have an appreciation for the system. Hackers want to learn about complex systems work, but they have a profound respect for those complex systems. Thus, they're not engaged in the business of getting rich no matter what the cost to others.

All the people I know who only want to get rich end up in jobs that promise that. But they are all jobs that reek of unsustainability, like wall street traders and dot-com-type startups with a lot of hype and no business model or valuable contribution to society. These people are selfish and as we're seeing (and have seen during a thousand years of business cycles) their money is gone as quickly as it came.

Then pity me, though I wish you wouldn't. I do not find that I can believe in any world other than the material world, at least enough to sacrifice my efforts in this world.

If I am going to make a difference, I want to make a difference in the material world, not a spiritual one. If I am going to become wealthy, I want to do so in the material world. If I am going to produce art, I would do so in the material world.

Any spirituality that I do have, exists in the material world. I work in this world, I trade in this world, I appreciate in this world, I love in this world.

So what's so wrong with that?

And if my goals in this world demand that I create money, and if I pursue that goal aggressively, why would you pity me?

Your friend wants able means. Even if he doesn't know now what he would do with those means, it is enough for him to know that he wants them. He is already leagues ahead of the aimless majority that do not know at all what they want. If he wants money, then he should pursue that, and once he has it, he can decide what to do with it ... but at least he will have pursued and attained a goal, which is a claim shared by too few.

I think your pity is misplaced.

Great works of art make one feel beauty. Is feeling beauty a spiritual event?

I do not know what one may mean by spirituality. Perhaps they regard spirituality in the religious sense, such as a belief in a god and that he will take care of them. However I consider spirituality to be something intrinsic in all human being and quite detached from religion.

Much as intellectual stimulation is the food of the brain so too beauty is the food of the heart and I believe it is in the heart where spirituality, as I see such term, reigns.

If spirituality is what I see it to be, then your argument seems to be flawed as you consider spirituality to be detached from the material world.

I do not see how one can distinguish easily the material world from the spiritual one. If the act of helping out a poor person is considered to be spiritual, such act is still carried out in the material world. It is a material act as you are helping him with material things. Same argument can be used when helping an old lady pass the road. So too the act of feeling beauty is experienced in the material world however the act itself is spiritual. For some even making a difference in the material world is a spiritual act and certainly love is spiritual however facilitated through the material world.

I would challenge you to cite the part of the speech or anything else Rand ever wrote arguing that money should be the most important thing in one's life. The statement "Money will not give you the unearned, neither in matter nor in spirit," indicates what's more explicit elsewhere in the book, namely Rand's conviction that the material and (secular) spiritual are both of great importance in life and that neither trumps the other. Rather, one should seek to integrate them.

Having read Rand extensively when I was younger, I can't imagine she'd consider your friend's approach to life, as described, anything but sad as well.