>The point is to ensure that random events like which family you're born into can't strongly affect the course of your life. This is impossible. We pretend lik

>The point is to ensure that random events like which family you're born into can't strongly affect the course of your life. This is impossible. We pretend like it's not true in America, but one's parents have massive, near-total influence. That doesn't mean you'll turn out to be an exact clone of your mom or dad, but it does mean that your childhood, and the choices your parents make on the family's behalf, are going to dictate a great deal about your life from the day you're born until the day you die. There's no way around that. Should we take all of the community's children and randomly distribute them to different households so that parents with business aptitude don't grant their children an "unfair opportunity" by giving them good business advice? Is this not an unfair opportunity granted to children by the "random event" of their birth? If the benefit of a parent's intellectual resources is fair, why isn't the benefit of his/her financial resources? >However, note that we're talking about cutting a link. By default, opportunities are only available to people with past actual successes. By default, outcomes build upon outcomes and compound exponentially. We're looking to defy that natural process, cut a natural link, and thus regularize certain statistical structures. I disagree. By default, in the absence of a government, the market is open and opportunity is equal; two persons with no knowledge of one another can walk up to each other in the desert and make any trade considered agreeable between the two of them. That is equal opportunity. In a complex society, the government's role is to protect that natural transaction flow, not to confiscate the goods and redistribute in the way that it has decided is fair. That makes both parties unhappy and leaves only the governors pleased. The government protects natural transaction flow by refusing to allow the enforcement of provisions that would unfairly exclude the participation of large portions of the population based on artificially imposed constraints (i.e., not inherent constraints that exist due to lack of financial, physical, or mental resources). Natural marketplaces are also safeguarded by refusing to allow similarly artificial prohibitions to flow from the centralization of control within certain de-facto authorities, usually monopolies or cabals. And for all that to work, the government also must provide more basic enforcement to safeguard human life and protect private property. That's basically it! The goal is not to equalize the outcome, or ensure that the difficulty gradient of actually succeeding is identical or near-identical for everyone (which is impossible). Opportunity refers to the ability to start out without someone's boot on your neck, not the ability to do better than your peers (that's merit, not opportunity).