Dear Sir/Madam,

The comment by Mark Lawson in today's Guardian set me thinking about MONEY (Whose life is it anyway?, 11 October 2003).

That "Money makes the world go round" is a platitude, the truth of which goes unquestioned. Put to music, we have learned to love it: Money, Money, Money, . . . Money makes the world go round, The world go round, . . . . Money makes the world go round . . .  What a cheerful tune to such an obvious truth. We laugh and get on with our lives - much of which involves making, spending and investing MONEY.

If you think about it, though, placing the amusement and banality of it to one side, you may realise, as I recently did, that it is in fact a false analogy - and a dangerous one at that. It compares human activity (or 90 percent of it) with the rotation of our planet, which has always spun on its axis and always will, thus implying that it is in the essential, natural and unchangeable order of things.

Human activity and social development, mediated largely by the use of money, are not rotary - and thus perpetual and essentially unalterable, like the rotation of the Earth - but linear. They have their origins in the not-so-distant past and are leading somewhere. They led us through the 19th and 20th Centuries to the modern world we live in today, and are leading us on towards tomorrow, the shape and quality of which depends very much on how WE make, spend and invest MONEY.

We have an abundance of LAWS which regulate the use of money, but a singular lack of MORALITY - thus facilitating the functioning of our amoral economy, based largely, as it is, on our amoral animal nature, rather than our moral human nature, as it should be (see "Moore's Mistake").