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>Opportunity basically means that everyone has the same rights of access to the marketplace. It doesn't make any guarantee about anyone's success once they ente

>Opportunity basically means that everyone has the same rights of access to the marketplace. It doesn't make any guarantee about anyone's success once they enter that marketplace. Having money (derived from inheritance or anywhere else) gives you privileged access to the marketplace since it helps you get over natural as well as artificial barriers to entry. This is exactly why the unifying feature of entrepreneurs is not a greater appetite for risk (quite the opposite), but access to cash - often from parents: http://www.andrewoswald.com/docs/entrepre.pdf http://www.andrewoswald.com/docs/entrepre.pdf >Since we don't have a substantial, legally-enforced caste system or other artificial limitations on success in America, Access to wealth is an artificial limitation on success and it's largely what the American caste system is geared around. >I'm not sure why you say that confiscating a family's resources will ensure opportunity for anybody. Opportunity flows from resources. You can act like you don't care about equality of opportunity or you can support a 100% inheritance tax (and no private education) but you can't really have it both ways.

cookiecaper 10y ago
>Having money (derived from inheritance or anywhere else) gives you privileged access to the marketplace since it helps you get over natural as well as artificial barriers to entry. You're re-defining opportunity to mean the same thing as outcome. If all outcomes must be equal for opportunities to be equal, which is the argument you're making when you say that both artificial and natural barriers must be equally surmountable and that any potential benefit, direct or indirect, from one's access to and deployment of resources is inherently unfair, then you're in an argument that fundamentally opposes private property and the hard physical realities that dictate human behavior. If you have a specific complaint, like that the qualifications to be admitted to the bar in almost every state require graduation from a school accredited by the ABA and that this constitutes an unfair monopoly and presents an unduly burdensome artificial constraint which was installed only to limit competition in the law profession, then that's a totally valid example of opportunity gap that should be fixed. But saying "Someone with more resources could potentially derive more benefits, either direct or indirect, than someone without an equivalent quantity of resources, as long as they deploy them efficiently" is only stating the obvious. Suggesting that this is an inequity to be resolved is simply suggesting that individuals should not be trusted to participate in a real marketplace at all.

cookiecaper 10y ago

>Having money (derived from inheritance or anywhere else) gives you privileged access to the marketplace since it helps you get over natural as well as artificial barriers to entry. You're re-defining opportunity to mean the same thing as outcome. If all outcomes must be equal for opportunities to be equal, which is the argument you're making when you say that both artificial and natural barriers must be equally surmountable and that any potential benefit, direct or indirect, from one's access to and deployment of resources is inherently unfair, then you're in an argument that fundamentally opposes private property and the hard physical realities that dictate human behavior. If you have a specific complaint, like that the qualifications to be admitted to the bar in almost every state require graduation from a school accredited by the ABA and that this constitutes an unfair monopoly and presents an unduly burdensome artificial constraint which was installed only to limit competition in the law profession, then that's a totally valid example of opportunity gap that should be fixed. But saying "Someone with more resources could potentially derive more benefits, either direct or indirect, than someone without an equivalent quantity of resources, as long as they deploy them efficiently" is only stating the obvious. Suggesting that this is an inequity to be resolved is simply suggesting that individuals should not be trusted to participate in a real marketplace at all.