If the love of money is the root of all evil, why does society depend so much on it?

Answer 1

If our society changed to another form of currency, than the new form would be considered the "root of all evil." This phrase is based on that everyone wants money; to survive or just have that nice, new gadget. It makes others do crazy things to get it, whether working all day and nite or even cheating or stealing. Unfortunately there is no simple solution to solve the problem with distributing currency equally, because of greed and envy.

Answer 2

This is basic economics. Money is required to provide a method of communications between consumers and suppliers. When you are willing to pay a certain amount of money for a given product, you are communicating value to the producer. If you are not willing to pay what they are charging, you are also communicating.

Supply and demand determines price. It's that simple. If you try to set prices by government fiat you end up with rationing. That is what caused the oil crisis of the early 1970s. The U.S. government set prices, the supply of gasoline ran out, and people were then unable to buy gas at any price.

The reason we haven't had that problem in the last couple of years is that prices have been allowed to find their own level, and demand has contracted to meet the available supply.

Let's look at another example. If the government was to set the price for all diamonds at some artificially low price, you would not be able to buy diamond jewelry anymore. This would happen because industrys that use diamonds for cutting and abrasive uses would buy up all the supply at the artificially lowered price, leaving none for you to buy.

On the other hand, if the supplier of diamonds is allowed to charge whatever the market will bear, then they will sell the lower grade diamonds that are not really suitable for jewelry at a lower price to industry, and then mark up the jewelry grade diamonds to sell to the general public at whatever price they are willing to pay to have diamond jewelry.

If you didn't have a medium of exchange to allow consumers to communicate all of this information then suppliers would have no way to know how many people want to buy their product and at what price. This is why capatalist societies are so much more efficient and free than socialist societies. The market is infinitely more capable of determining the value of a given item to the public at large than some government bureaucrat would be.

Our health care system is another good place to look at market forces. If the government gets involved and fixes the prices that doctors and hospitals can charge to an artificially low rate, then less young people will choose to make the twelve year committment and the huge financial burden involved with becoming a doctor. Businesses will have no interest in continuing to run a hospital that is doomed to lose money; so hospitals will close. The end result would be that we would have rationed care just like they do in Canada.

Think about the original quote. LOVE of money is the root of all evil, not the money itself. This is the same thinking that would have us believe that guns are the reason for gun violence. Violent people with guns are the reason for gun violence. The gun is only a tool. It is neither good nor bad. Money is also a tool, and it is neither good nor bad in itself.

Evil is a human condition. We must treat it in the heart of mankind, and stop trying to foist our own failings off on inanimate objects.

Answer 3

Society depends on money, not the love of money. The Capitalist system is rooted in the love of money, so is the root of all evil.

It really means that the love of money makes people do anything, including selling their mother to the devil, hurting anyone, and so on. It's not money that is bad, but the love of it. It's not just money, by the way, its accumulating anything.

Answer 4

In todays world you have to depend on money to get by. But it is how we use the money and the fact that people love money more than they love the Lord that is the evil part of it.

Answer 5

Society doesn't depend on the love of money, but money itself is necessary to facilitate a distribution of resources according to labor and consumption.

One could also go the Soviet way - you work for a week, you get a week's worth of rations, rent and two tickets to watch the Ukranian-burning in the Sulyvei.

Answer 6

Two minutes' thought, and you'll realize that the love of money is NOT the root of all evil.

Are rapes committed for love of money? What about murders of passion? A man finds his wife with another man, and kills them both - did he do it because he loved money? Going back to christian mythology, since that's where this stupid saying comes from - was the serpent in Eden motivated by money?

Answer 7

Because society is evil?

Answer 8

Money is not the root of all evil. I can prove it.

If I give money to fund AIDS research, or help disaster victims, or use it to feed my children, etc... am I not doing an implicitly good thing with money? If I use it to donate to the poor, or fund welfare programs, or support the economy and thusly provide jobs for working families, how is that evil?

Money, like everything else, is neither good nor evil. It is only circumstance which makes something right or wrong. A gun or a knife or a pile of money or a bunch of chemicals or a business or a nation or a person... all of these things are not inherently good or evil. Actions and ideas are the only things which can be determined to be right or wrong.

For example, the action of drug abuse is wrong because it is irrational and immoral, due to the harmful consequences to the self and possibly others. There is no circumstance where drug "abuse" is a good thing. That's why it's called abuse. Whereas, there is a proper use for chemicals known as drugs, if they have medicinal purposes and can treat illness or ease pain.

Another example, the idea that money is the root of all evil is flawed, because money in and of itself causes no harm to living things. Money is simply a representation of currency, which represents a trade value. Without currency there would still be standards of wealth and value, such as foods, metals, commodities, land usage, personal property, etc. Therefore, claiming money to be evil is like claiming every physical thing that is valued by man to be evil.

The phrase "love of money" is subjective, as "love" is a loaded and overused word. There's nothing inherently wrong with understanding the value of money, and knowing how best to trade it in our economic system. There will always be people who are more apt in some areas than others, and there is no need to punish them for simply knowing how to handle money, or label them evil simply because they do not buy pet rocks and candy necklaces with thier surplus funds.

Fiscal conservatives, for example, are labeled greedy "lovers" of money. Therefore, if you don't waste your money on insurance scams, junk magazine subscriptions, overpriced vehicles, and other impractical investments, you must be "greedy". But then again, saving resources in times of plenty in order to prepare for times of famine is something which occurs in nature. Animals do not consume all of thier resources right away, especially with changing climates. Therefore rationing money and resources is not evil, it's simply a tool for survival.

Arguing against the concept of saving money is like arguing against the concept of taking a deep breath before you go underwater; just plain stupid.

Since the "love" of money is a neccessity in a currency-based trade economy, it's not inherently evil.

How you use your money could be considered right or wrong, good or evil, however. Suppose you send money to al-qaeda to promote terrorism, that would be an immoral use of your money. Or perhaps if you pull a George Soros and purchase large quantities of a nation's currency, and then wait for a moment of market vulnerability and then sell it short, thereby causing a depression.

There are ethical ways to use money, and unethical ways. The same goes for any inanimate thing.

Good and evil apply to the ideas and actions people take, not the things people interact with. For example, cocaine in and of itself is not evil. It's just sitting there, doing nothing. Only living things can use and abuse the substance in a damaging and irrational way.

Getting back to your question, society would function the same way it does now without money. People would still have to work to grow food, save up in times of plenty, ration what they have, and trade thier resources. Money just makes it a whole lot simpler. If you don't think so, then imagine a system without money. Say you're a web designer. You want to buy a box of cereal. Does this mean you have to trade your skill in order to get food? What will you do if the cereal company in question already has a website and is not interested in your services? You would have to find out what they do want, in this case, perhaps they need steel to build a new plant. Now you need to find out where you can trade your web designing skills for steel. And the nightmare continues. Maybe someday, before you die of starvation, you will realize that currency, money, is the best way of keeping people from starving to death, and promting people to mass produce extra commodities instead of produce only what they need, which provides extra resources for the poor, the disabled, and otherwise unable to fend for themselves.

I hope this clears things up for you.

Answer 9

because we are slaves to it. We're hooked, as much as any crack head. When we don't have it, we will just about anything to get it. And the few that have to much, only want more. And it's been going on for so long that nobody can envision anything different or else they are deemed insane. The lunatics have taken over the asylum.

Answer 10

Because...society is evil?