Re: OT - Daschle's Diner

dnoyeB wrote:
<SNIP>


In the US is the folks in the middle that work the hardest, and the ones on top that tend to be lucky.

Before we move on - have you ever actually *run* a company or at least
been in charge of a significant staff of people? Or are you just peddling
more class-envy? Class envy is beneath the dignity of any civilized
person, BTW.

You statement is baldly false in most cases. There a people who
are wealthy that have not earned it, of course - say those who get it
via inheritence - but they are the minority. The vast majority of wealth
is earned by owning/running businesses. And you are seriously kidding
yourself if you think the middle class works the hardest. "Harder", I
believe, is probably most easily measured by number of working hours
expended. (I have had jobs that involved physical labor and jobs that
were essentially mental, and the mentally-centric jobs are just as hard
to do, and perhaps more difficult. So, I don't buy the argument that
physical labor necessarily makes you a "harder worker", though every
union rep tries to sell that nonsense at contract time.) By that
measure, poor people work even harder than the middle class for far less. And the working rich
- corporate execs, business owners, etc. - work far harder than
either of them, almost without exception by this measure. I am not saying
the wealthy deserve any special commendation for their hard work - they
are handsomly rewarded for it. But the classist argument you put forth
above is just nonsense (in *most*, but not all cases).

Luck/good fortune/timing and so on plays some role in success, but it
is not the major determinant. Luck is most usually trotted out as
the basis for success by people who are not all that successful and need
to rationalize their own mediocrity or failure. I know plenty of people -
myself among them - who grew up in very meager circumstances, had no
particular connections, didn't go to the "right" schools, and still
managed to become comfortably successful. Some of these people I know
are flat out wealthy, and some are fabulously rich. So, no, I don't buy
the "luck" argument at all.


----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tim Daneliuk tundra@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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