I approve of the right to leave one's money to one's relatives, even if they are undeserving wretches!
The interesting thing is that the stupid rich will soon be the stupid poor.
Not really. There are people in this country with enough wealth that many generations that follow could become a permanent pseudo-gentry without ever achieving anything of their own. What kind of justice is that?
I have been poor, really poor. My parents had a good deal of money but I would never ask them for anything.
That meant I had to make it on my own. I made foolish choices, made honest mistakes and was able to take advantage of some helping hands along the way. Didn't do drugs or drink liquor.
That's great. Did you go to college?
I had been told that if I wrote a bad check I'd go straight to jail so, guess what? I never wrote a bad check!
Because putting someone in jail is a sure-fire way to make sure they pay you back what they owe you.
Sometimes I went without food so that I could pay my bills.
What would you say that did for you?
I had the good fortune to be healthy enough to carry on.
You're right. You were quite lucky. A lot of the people who are poor got that way because of health crises that made it impossible for them to work and that drove them to bankruptcy. We still don't think that health care is a human right.
I lived in a neighborhood for a time where everyone was poor. There was no attitude of entitlement in those days but, there was something else "It doesn't matter if you sock it to the man".
We are now experiencing a large segment of our society living by the principle that it doesn't matter if you "sock it to the man". In fact, our government is "socking it to the man" via taxation and the attitude of entitlement grows like a cancer in the land.
It is several times more expensive for children to get the kind of education that would allow them to secure one of the ever-less-abundant well-paying jobs. This isn't an entitlement attitude. It's the recognition that they system is rigged, and outrage at the unfairness of how fully our society, including our government, caters to the needs of the already-powerful and ignores the voiceless.