I begin with the purpose of the book, as expressed by Hugh Nibley himself:
Some thoughts on money:"All my life I have shied away from these disturbing and highly unpopular—even offensive—themes [the uses of money]. But I cannot do so any longer, because in my old age I have taken to reading the scriptures and there have had it forced upon my reluctant attention, that from the time of Adam to the present day, Zion has been pitted against Babylon, and the name of the game has always been money—"power and gain".
"The miraculous power of money lies above all in the faith that it can stop the ravages of time. As the vigor of youth wanes, accumulating fortune can guarantee that time's effects will be minimized. The scriptures also speak of money as the most irresistible of all agencies of change in one direction. They call it a deadly cancer which once started cannot be stopped (James 5:3; Mormon 8:38). It is called filthy and nasty in the letter to Titus (Titus 1:7, 11). In 1 Timothy it is called the great deceiver whose deceptions lead always to ruin (1 Timothy 5:6). Repeatedly in the Book of Mormon we are told that when people "set their hearts upon riches," their doom is sealed. When the obsession for power and gain overcomes everything else in its final stages, it preempts the whole program of change."
What is success?"To make merchandise of another's necessity is an offense to human dignity."
How about the environment?"The same requirements are made of rich and poor, namely a broken heart and contrite spirit, contentment with sufficiency (1 Timothy 6:5-8), no envy of another's possessions, no preoccupation of getting more, not acquiring by the labor of others. God rejects all our rationalizations, our fervid moral tone and glorification of those traits of character that lead to success."
"As President Joseph F. Smith put it, "Things upon the earth, so far as they have not been perverted by wickedness, are typical of things in heaven. Heaven was the prototype of this beautiful creation when it came from the hand of the Creator, and was pronounced 'good.'"5 There you have the environment of Zion; and for a foretaste of it, all we have to do is go to the canyons and look around us. For the earth comes from the hand of the Creator most glorious and beautiful, with great rivers, small streams, and mountains and hills to give variety and beauty to the scene, designed by God as a place of beauty and delight. That is the way we must keep it."
The importance of the Law of Consecration:
**As a side note, anyone who wants a copy of the book in PDF format can message me with your email address and I will happily send you a copy."In giving his children the law, God repeatedly specifies that he is placing before them two ways, the ways of life and death, light and darkness. For parallel to the one law runs another. It is part of the plan that Satan should be allowed to try us and to tempt us to see whether we would prove faithful in all things: Who does not live up to every covenant made with the Lord will be in his power (cf. Moses 4:4, 5:23). So we find ourselves drawn in two directions (Moroni 7:11-13). Thus this life becomes a special test of probation set before us in this world—it is an economic one. If the law of consecration is the supreme test of virtue—the final one—money is to be the supreme temptation to vice; sex runs a poor second, but on both counts, this is the time and place for us to meet the challenge of the flesh. It is the weakness of the flesh in both cases to prove our spirits stronger than the pull of matter, to assert our command over the new medium of physical bodies before proceeding onward to another state of existence. As Brigham Young often repeats, "God has given us the things of this world to see what we will do with them." The test will be whether we will set our hearts on the four things that lead to destruction. Whoever seeks for (1) wealth, (2) power, (3) popularity, and (4) the pleasures of the flesh—anyone who seeks those will be destroyed, says the Book of Mormon (1 Nephi 22:23; 3 Nephi 6:15). Need we point out that those four things compose the whole substance of success in the present-day world. They are the things that money will get you."