I received an e-mail from a fellow who offered me $35 to run an ad on the alcohol, tobacco, and firearms page of this site for a alcoholism/drug addiction resource. I declined the offer for the same reason I don't display any money-making gimmicks such as 'tip jars.' The work I do on this site is a labor of love and an end in itself. To commercialize it would be to sully it. Of course, I have no objection to someone else turning a buck from his online work. If you need money, go ahead and try to earn some by any legitimate means and if this involves cluttering your site with advertising and such, it's a free country. But if you have enough of the lean green, then why not be content with what you have and turn your mind to the nonutilitarian?
"But what if he offered you $3,500?" Well, if I don't need $35, why would I need $3,500 or $35,000?
Money, like sex, has an astonishing delusive power, a power to corrupt and distort, so much so that many think it the root of all evil. That cannot be right, of course, as a little thought will show: the most one can say is that the inordinate love of money is at the root of some evils. See Money, Sex, Power, and Fame and Radix Omnium Malorum. Nevertheless, money makes people crazy and they have a hard time thinking clearly about it. They think it will buy them happiness when at the most it will buy them the absence of certain forms of misery. Just as absurd is the notion promoted in the silliest song of all time, John Lennon's Imagine, that the abolition of money is the way to human flourishing:
Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world…
It says something that this asinine exercise in the utopian is considered one of the greatest songs of all time. I am referring to the lyrics, not the music, which is not bad.