Essay on Argumentation

sorry its late Ms. Brown my computer at home doesn't really have internet and our printer didnt work but.. this is it even though i didnt understand what the questions was. You should see improvements though regarding the one we did in class.


As we all know, money is the ruth of all evil, even Lapham agrees with this. It can lead to positive returns, and it can also lead to extremely negative results. America as a whole relies heavily on mone.

Money in our society has become a sense of power and authority. Although money isn't a bad thing it effects the way people act and causes them to not care about the things that they should many times.Microeconomics is a powerful factor in the way that companies handle their business. Money runs these companies from the ground up and often is more important than the people that work there. The importance of money in a person's life can vary greatly by individual, culture, and social status. Although most of us will agree that money should never be the most important thing in life, we must recognize that in our currency-based culture in does hold a significant degree of importance and even necessity. Money is required for food, shelter, and clothing, even in its simplest form.
Power is money and money is power. There are many more examples of this now than anytime in the past.
One of the most obvious examples is politics. Ross Perot was an unkown multimillionaire and his money is the only reason that he made it into the presidential election. If a man who earned a standard salary wanted to run for president, he would have almost no chance at all unless he was backed by people with money.
Every four years when the U.S. Presidential election is held, hundreds of millions of dollars are spent. The more money a candidate has, the farther he can get. Although the richest competitor doesn’t always win, the president is usually a very wealthy man. Wealth paves the road to a good education. If the presidential candidate is rich, he either inherited it or was educated enough to make it.



a commodity accepted by general consent as a medium of economic exchange. It is the medium in which prices and values are expressed; as currency, it circulates anonymously from person to person and country to country, thus facilitating trade, and it is the principal measure of wealth.

The subject of money has fascinated people from the time of Aristotle to the present day. The piece of paper labeled 1 dollar, 10 euros, 100 yuan, or 1,000 yen is little different, as paper, from a piece of the same size torn from a newspaper or magazine, yet it will enable its bearer to command some measure of food, drink, clothing, and the remaining goods of life while the other is fit only to light the fire. Whence the difference? The easy answer, and the right one, is that modern money is a social contrivance. People accept money as such because they know that others will. This common knowledge makes the pieces of paper valuable because everyone thinks they are, and everyone thinks they are because in his or her experience money has always been accepted in exchange for valuable goods, assets, or services. At bottom money is, then, a social convention, but a convention of uncommon strength that people will abide by even under extreme provocation. The strength of the convention is, of course, what enables governments to profit by inflating (increasing the quantity of) the currency. But it is not indestructible. When great increases occur in the quantity of these pieces of paper—as they have during and after wars—money may be seen to be, after all, no more than pieces of paper. If the social arrangement that sustains money as a medium of exchange breaks down, people will then seek substitutes—like the cigarettes and cognac that for a time served as the medium of exchange in Germany after World War II. New money may substitute for old under less extreme...


Money is the primary vehicle of social abstraction, lending objectivity to our ideas, actions and status
As an engine of class inequality, it has often been held to disrupt community
misogyny of this patriarchal and capitalistic society whereby men use their "power", in this case money
The only “power” that they really have is whatever money they have
In the extreme it may induce us to neglect weightier matters or even engage in unethical or illegal conduct
Money has no value apart from the purposes to which it is applied. The functional essence of money is power over the development, management, consumption, and disposition of personal and community resources. If that power is exercised in a manner that enhances spiritual growth, its value as an agent for contributing to an authentic state of happiness and personal fulfillment is readily apparent.
When our income is insufficient to meet our perceived needs and wants, we may be tempted to resort to consumer debt to make up the shortfall. And it is so easy, isn't it? We are bombarded by offers of preapproved credit cards, so-called "payday loans," and financing arrangements with "zero down, no payments until next year." Rarely is it advisable to fund consumption through borrowing. Debt must be repaid with interest. It thus limits the borrower's ability to fund consumption in the future, and the high rates of interest associated with consumer debt significantly increase current consumption costs. In the words of President J. Reuben Clark, Jr.: Once in debt, interest is your companion every minute of the day and night; you cannot shun it or slip away from it; you cannot dismiss it; it yields neither to entreaties, demands, or orders; and whenever you get in its way or cross its course or fail to meet its demands, it crushes you.
As a symbolic medium of communication, money informs our subjectivity and gives concrete expression to our desires, releasing and fixing our imagination in many ways. It is a store of individual and collective memory, the stuff linking persons to their communities. It may be that money’s chief function was once to persuade people to let go of what they already had; but separating us from it has become the chief object of the engines of persuasion mobilized by capitalist economy. And the ideas we have of money were themselves disseminated by “worldly philosophers” who devoted a significant part of their effort to persuading people to accept them. It is hard to separate money’s unconscious influence on us through folk discourse from its characteristics as a social force sui generis.
What then is money? It is a universal measure of value, but its specific form is not yet as universal as the method that humanity has devised to measure time all round the world. It is purchasing power, a means of buying and selling in markets. It counts wealth and status. It is a store of memory linking individuals to their various communities, a kind of memory bank and thus a source of identity. As a symbolic medium, it conveys information through a system of signs that relies more on numbers than words. A lot more circulates with money than the goods and services it buys.
have for the most part taken at face value an idealist premise that money has a mind of its own, since it seems to me that most members of capitalist societies are caught in it. The very rich do not have to accept this premise, but they are happy for the rest of us to believe in the story of our own captivity. I want us all eventually to have what the rich have, the creative ability to manipulate money. Hence I have tried here to discover something of what they know about money and what stops the masses from catching on. This has also meant excavating my own socialization as a dupe of the existing money system who has spent his life trying to escape from it. It is easier to embrace a rationalist or materialist alternative than to give credit to this murky stuff, learnt at my mother’s knee in the age of austerity. Spengler helped me to begin to understand some of my own irrational attitudes towards money. Why do I find it so hard to fill in tax returns or travel claim forms? Because being fixated on money as magnitude is a way of killing off the drive to grasp its infinite potential.
There are other catastrophes in addition to war that precipitate huge stacks of money being deposited into the coffers of the international bankers. They are the real benefactors of any catastrophe in whatever country you might name. They are the recipients of all the interest on government loans. They print the bank notes, and loan the money, often to both fighting factions, who fight the wars and then collect the interest from each side, the triumphant and the vanquished.