“while men with gold and silver by the chest
turn beggars, scorned by all and dispossessed”
the conclusion is that it doesn’t work without money.
in spite of the human civilizations over thousands of years, people can not deny the function of money. this shows how important money is. money plays a decisive role to individuals, to families and even to countries or nationalities. otherwise, why is everyone, from doorkeepers to presidents, trying to earn as much as possible? why does every country need chancellors of the exchequer, who keep formulating and revising financial laws and regulations? how different it is to be a creditor nation and a debtor nation! the united states is playing the tyrant just because it is wealthy enough. a poor man may cherish lofty aspirations, but will probably be beaten because of his poverty. the afghanistan may have won a lot of sympathy, but how difficult it would be to live solely on charity.
of all ages and in every country, all kinds of corruption stem from money. no matter how rough the man is, and in what despicable way he earned the money, he can grease the palms of or buy over some very decent officials or even intellectuals. can you see how crucial a role money is playing? (a case in point is the bankrupt of the company)
some people or organizations like some religious groups claim that they have seen through the human vanity and can take money lightly, but to people’s puzzlement, they are also accumulating money, either to renovate the temples, or to regild buddha’s statues, in whatever pretexts. they are not engaged in production, so they can only depend on the donations from the devout believers. sometimes your sincerity relies on whether you donate and how much you donate. do the monks care about money? the answer is affirmative. what’s more, many monks are already provided with a salary.
we are living in a material world, and it’s really difficult to deny the function of money or wealth. we need money for food, clothes, education, hospital, housing and transportation, etc. there’s rarely anything that doesn’t need money. what we can discuss now is not the importance of money, but whether money is almighty and whether more wealth can bring us more happiness.
we must say that money is not almighty, and there are many things which money can’t do. for example, many emperors like qin shihuang longed for elixirs. as wealthy as they were, and as mighty as they were to take every measure to search for long life medicine, they still could not avoid the sad denouement that “their graves are a covered with weeds”.