This thread has turned into a nonsense.
Egalitarian dreams built upon relatively limited supplies of personal, hands-on running of anything.
1. People are not born equally talented.
2. Pupìls in the same school, attending the same class will achieve vastly different degrees of success, despite sitting before the same teacher. Some kids are there to learn where others to disrupt and appear cooler than thou to their equally ignorant mates. The variations can and often do exist amongst kids from the same parents. I know this, from experience. It is not based on opportunity; it is based upon individual personality.
3. Employment. People find jobs because someone else needs them to perform a function for which they are, hopefully, trained. There is huge confusion in some circles about that relationship, some thinking that the employee is the person of principal value within that context. Yes, he or she can be, depending on rôle, but more often than not can be replaced whereas the entrepreneur cannot.
4. Some are born into riches and develop them further; others simply squander and often the third generation closes the business down or loses control to outside money.
5. Supply and demand is always the factor that governs the success of something, and when that product’s time is up – heavy engineering in the UK, for example, time is up, however hard it is for those once flourishing within it. It hits huge companies and even nationalised industries every bit as much as minnows such as myself. When it creased to make sense for me to plough money into stock photography, that’s the same logic that tells a government to stop backing redundant industries. That in my case it’s a part of one family that takes the hit makes it no less real a hit; that miners and shipyard workers and their families get hit is unfortunate, but they deserve no more sympathy than do I and mine. Whether it’s one or a group, the pain is the same.
6. This thread was never intended to create bitter splits in Lula, and perhaps it hasn’t: it may have just given opportunity for the usual suspects to unwind their bloodied, crimson banners another time. Either way, I’m afraid I see no further value here on this theme.
Rob C