It's The Socialist Party headquarters.
Whiney Socialists who rail against capitalism on the internet
always have a difficult time hiding their seething envy of the rich. In this article I found entitled Meritocracy is a Myth, James Bloodworth doesn’t just fail to hide his envy, he revels in it.
His entire exposition is a scathing rant against the rich and successful and
the “obscene privileges” they enjoy. The main argument of the article is that
because wealth is unevenly distributed, it is impossible for people to rise out
of poverty. Bloodworth fails to cite any evidence of this, other than asserting
that “a disadvantaged child will nearly always and everywhere become a
disadvantaged adult” as well as offering an out-of-context quote by Karl Marx. The
notion that anyone is perpetually bound to poverty is absolutely false and
there is no shortage of billionaires or people in your community who have risen
out of poverty and are living rebuttals to Bloodworth’s nonsense.
Bloodworth writes: “We insist on telling children that they
can be ‘whatever they want to be’, knowing full well that crushing
disappointment lies further in their future”. Essentially, this is just a
variation of the oft-repeated argument that the poor are perpetually poor and
the rich remain perpetually rich. “A disadvantaged child,” Bloodworth argues,
“will nearly always and everywhere become a disadvantaged adult”. However, this
is simply not true. Social mobility is alive and well in North America,
regardless of what Bloodworth and his ilk would have you believe. Of all the
billionaires on last year’s Forbes 400 list, 273 started with less-than-wealthy
beginnings[1].
For example, when Shahid Khan, a Pakistani immigrant, arrived in the US at the
age of 16, he earned 1.20$ an hour as a dishwasher, but through hard work and
dedication, he started one of the largest private companies in the US,
Flex-N-Gate. Khan is no exception. The founders of many successful
companies—from Howard Shultz of Starbucks to Oracle founder Larry Ellison, were
born into circumstances described by Bloodworth. However, poverty did not stop
these people from starting multi-billion dollar companies and achieving their
dreams. They could do it, so why can’t you?
The fact that one can improve their economic standing through
hard work is not just true of a few select billionaires, but with most people
in western society. Through 1996 to 2005, the US Treasury Department conducted
a study in which they observed the wages earned by individuals over time. The
data they collected shows that the incomes of those individuals in the bottom
twenty percent increased on average by 90 percent over that time.[2]
Whereas, the incomes of those in the top 20 percent of wage-earners only saw a
10 percent increase over that same time. What does this tell us? It shows that
people’s incomes fluctuate over time. Most people who are earning shitty pay at
a given instance (usually because they are young, inexperienced, unskilled, or just
unlucky) will be earning more sometime in their future. There is no consistent
“1%”. In North America at least, it is the norm that people earn more money in
the 30s and 40s than they did in their teens. Anybody who is a hard worker and
has a skill that is valuable in the market can move up the ladder, so to speak,
and enjoy the fruits of their labour.
Relevant.
Bloodworth argues further that children of rich families are
more privileged than the poor because the rich can afford to send their kids to
University. “Around 10 percent of young people at the bottom rung of the social
ladder go to university compared with over 80 per cent of those from
professional or managerial backgrounds”. While I do not dispute that statistic, I
fail to see how this is an argument against meritocracy. If someone has worked
hard their whole lives and made an honest living, they have earned the right for
their families to live comfortably. Rich parents can afford to hire tutors for
their kids. They can afford books, calculators, pencil-crayons, private-school
fees, and of course college tuition. Kids from rich families are certainly more
privileged than the poor in this respect, but I believe the old adage “You can
lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink” should not be forgotten.
All the financial support and tuition fees in the world won’t educate someone
who is unwilling to help themselves. Even though more rich students are
enrolled in university than poor students, they are still held to the same
standard. I personally knew many students throughout high school who were
borderline retarded but only got into university because their parents were
rich and would accept no other option for their jewel-encrusted offspring.
However, many of these students were the first ones to drop out once they found
things difficult. Even if you are born spoiled rotten with wealth and
privilege, you still have to work in order to maintain it. Those who are born into poverty, whose business sense and work ethic are stronger than average, can only increase their economic standing over time. Whereas, someone with no desire for work who is born into a rich family will only lose his money over time.
“Equality”, when used in the context of Bloodworth’s article
is not about equality of opportunity,
where everyone is held to the same standards and expectations, but about equality of outcome. Although he doesn’t
explicitly say so, Bloodworth wants equality to be mandated and enforced by the
state. He advocates a world in which people are truly not free to improve their
economic standing through hard work and effort. Equality of opportunity and
equality of outcome are mutually exclusive. If individuals are not free to
succeed or fail by their own efforts, then they are not really free in any
meaningful sense.
