Note to Michael:
First of all, it’s not “Money is the root of all evil,” it’s “Love of money is the root of all evil.” [1 Timothy 6:10]
Beyond that, though:
There is a large overlap between the people who want a society without money, and those who want a society without guns.
The link is that both guns and money are tools that allow individuals to exercise their power to choose how they will live their lives, and to resist those who would coerce them.
Socialists find this intolerable. According to socialist theory, individuals should, must, devout their lives and resources to the good of the collective, the state, in order to achieve the most good for the most people. And underlying this is the idea that individuals are not competent to live their lives as they choose. Better to let enlightened, expert socialists to run their lives for them. In order to to do this, the experts must have a monopoly on choice (money) and coercion (violence, especially guns).
As I noted the other night, the real root of all evil is the love of theory, that is, the insistence that, against the evidence, the theory can’t be wrong, do it again, harder.
Whittle points to William M. Briggs as the originator of the phrase.
By the way, it is a pet peeve of mine to call any intellectual model of something a “theory”. In science, a model is a explanatory, predictive description of some system or process. A hypothesis is a model that in principle can be falsified, that is, the evidence that would disprove the model can be unambiguously stated. A theory is a hypothesis that has, so far, survived all attempts to prove it wrong.
Socialism has been proved wrong many, many times. Nevertheless, it remains popular because, gosh, wouldn’t it be great if humans really worked that way?
Tags: Bill Whittle, William M. Briggs