Found on Reddit. This was in cool guides.
(media.scored.co)
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I still enjoy the story of the actual book but these people don’t understand that the best you can do is say everyone has equal opportunity. As Sowell has said numerous times, life is a lottery. You can be born to a drug addicted mother or you can be born to billionaire parents. Those who have more and care are always welcome to voluntarily donate, tutor, or whatever. Volunteering is free.
Life is a series of choices, you get out of life what you put into it. You may not be able to control what happens but you are 100% in control of how you react (paraphrased from something Larry Elder’s dad said).
Honestly as a kid I hated to hear that life wasn’t fair, but that is a fact. Some people will have better access and opportunities. Teaching young people to blame nebulous forces for their shortcomings is dangerous
No. Your birth was not an accident. You are the product of the deliberate choices made by your parents, and your parents were products of the community and culture surrounding them. If your parents worked hard to provide a good life for you, and my parents fucked off and screwed me over, then our respective lots in life aren’t some arbitrary “lottery”. It’s just cause and effect, with plenty of blame to go around.
This compulsion to blame “society” for all disparate outcomes is really a subversive movement to separate children from parents and people from cultures. Advantages of birth are mostly earned, and the state redistributing those advantages is always communism. Why should the child of a crack whore have the same advantages in life as the child of two hard working parents? And what becomes of society when you artificially flatten those advantages in the name of equity? Why work hard for your children if their heightened productivity is just going to fund someone else’s shitty kids?
Not disagreeing with you but I guess I meant lottery in the sense that some people are born with natural talent like music and some aren’t. Some are born beautiful and many aren’t. But yes I agree with your statement regarding your parents effort. Case in point my parents were very strict about saving and investing and gave me many lectures about sound money. Unfortunately I didn’t take that advice until my 30s and am still reaping a few consequences from my younger years. My parents now are having a ball in retirement.
It's not a statement trying ignoring genetics or parental impact on a child and saying it's all random. It's a framing that only really works if you believe in a soul as the defining feature of a person. The "lottery" aspect is looking at it as if you're a soul about to be born onto earth. Then which parents and their circumstances are the random part.
It's just saying you didn't pick your parents and have to work with the opening hand you were dealt.
If you don't accept the framing then the sentiment doesn't make sense. The crack whore's kid could never have been born to the hardworking parents and vice-versa. In that case there's no possibilities because there's nothing comprising "you" before birth.
Its still a lottery, because you yourself cannot effect a single one of those things. You can only start to change or fix them once you are a decent ways into your life.
Sure we can trace every single little bit down to who and what it to blame for it happening, but that doesn't change the fact that you popped out and were dealt a hand that is either extremely lucky or terribly awfully not.
Generally, because children are innocent and shouldn't always be held to suffer infinitely the sins of their parents. If the situation of your birth has already determined your entire lot in life, then why should they ever work hard to begin with? You've already decided their value is worthless before they could even talk. Which just creates a resentful underbelly of losers who know they will never make it and turn to just taking it instead, through violence and crime.
There is a wide valley between "give crack babies a fighting chance to not end up a gang banger" and "give them free college and money and everything possible."