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Honest Abe says

We are all self made men, but only the successful one's admit it. For the others- its everyone elses fault

I'm successful, and I say I couldn't have done it without the scientific method, the sewer system, the highway transportation system, the electric grid, and a million other things built before I was born.

Try traveling back in time to the stone age and being "successful" by modern standards. How many factories would you have built in the stone age? Would you even have lived pass 30?

Honest Abe says

No one can stop someone from becoming successful,

From Andrew Carnegie to Bill Gates, there are many people who disprove that hypothesis. Not to mention that whole slavery thing that lasted several hundred years on this continent. How much opportunity did slaves have to become successful? Hell, George Zimmerman stopped Trayvon Martin from becoming successful in just a few seconds.

Never underestimate the power of being born at the right place and the right time. Had Warren Buffet been born in Ethiopia or rural China, he wouldn't be rich at all.

Yes, one is ultimately responsible for his or her success and we are all wholly responsible for our actions. But to suggest that it is merely sheer force of will that determines success like Green Lantern building a bridge with his mind is utterly wrong.

In order for a person to be successful one of two things must happen. Either the person must be given some privilege or there must be a fair system which allows all to succeed based on their own merit and hard work. I, personally, vote for the later.

Of course, for a fair system that allows all intelligent, talented, hard-working individuals to succeed, the can be no parasitic behavior and no rigging of games. This means that corporations cannot have enough power to dictate terms of employment. Nor can any corporations or oligopoly control the means of production or a public resource like the EM spectrum. This includes companies like Viacom and the large telecoms.

In fact, there are many things in our legal system from the DMCA to patent laws to fractional reserve banking to lobbying that prevent people from becoming self-made men because the parasites on top have the money and power to prevent competition and innovation.

Just take a look at clean energy. For over 100 years, we have subsidized oil companies. Do you really think that oil companies want any energy solution that allows individuals to cheaply produce pollution-free energy in their own backyards? That would kill all energy companies because they depend on centralized control of energy.

No one can stop someone from becoming successful, my ass.

http://www.youtube.com/embed/mL-AFSAIln0

http://www.youtube.com/embed/iEJNJ0rFSe8

Yeah, capitalism rewards hard work and ingenuity my ass. It rewards backstabbing and sabotaging your competitors and your partners. Now a system that actually did reward hard-work, productivity, and ingenuity, that would be worth sucking every cock in the universe to get.

Honest Abe says

No one can stop someone from becoming successful,

Utterly nonsense. Anyone that is truly successful will admit that luck played a very big part. Being in the right time and place to take advantage of the opportunities is the most important part. if Gary Kildell had been in his office at digital research when IBM came by no would have ever heard of Bill Gates, who's only product at the time was a very buggy basic interpreter for the altair, Instead Bill got to be the richest man on earth selling a very buggy knock off of Gary's os.

What you guys refuse to acknowledge is that the cream always rises to the top. "You can't keep a good man down". "He raised himself by his own bootstraps". "He did it as a walk-on". "She made it to the top without affirmative action". "He became successful without a college degree".

You guys can have all the pity parties you want, but you won't have any successful people in attendance. Good day.

OK Dan, you're right. Government - our wonderful, kind, caring, benevolent government has succeeded in preventing people from succeeding as you pointed out. Does that mean government is NOT our friend?

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/ideas-that-made--100-million.html

Darn, yet more stories surfacing about ordinary citizens overcoming the roadblocks imposed by govenment intervention and still becoming successful, self made men (or women).

I formally declare the myth of debunking the selfmade man myth is debunked. Its nothing more than liberal hogwash.

Honest Abe says

OK Dan, you're right. Government - our wonderful, kind, caring, benevolent government has succeeded in preventing people from succeeding as you pointed out. Does that mean government is NOT our friend?

You are misinterpreting what I've said. Of course our government is evil as I've said in many posts.

You keep thinking that our society either has to be Communistic with zero wealth difference and collective ownership of everything, or absolute fascism with no restraints on corporations. This is simply a false dichotomy. There are an infinite number of alternatives.

The fact is that any government or law is, by definition, socialism. The mere presence of government or law is the restriction of an individual's freedom to perform actions for the benefit of others. Laws that prevent stealing and burning down your neighbor's house are socialism.

The question is not whether we should have a socialistic economy or a capitalistic one. Nor is the question how much socialism or capitalism we should have. The question is how to structure socialism and capitalism within our economy.

Remember, that maintaining a military or a road system is socialism by definition!

What I want, is to eliminate the parasites who prevent individuals from succeeding by monopolizing public resources, bribing senators to pass laws they wrote for themselves, and otherwise preventing an even playing field. How exactly is this incompatible with your political and economic beliefs?

Honest Abe says

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/ideas-that-made--100-million.html

Darn, yet more stories surfacing about ordinary citizens overcoming the roadblocks imposed by govenment intervention and still becoming successful, self made men (or women).

I noticed that every single one of those stories is about inventors, not the CEOs of fortune 500 companies. I've always said that the only way to truly produce millions of dollars of wealth is to invent something or be an entertainer.

Inventors and entertainers are not parasites. Even the baseball player who makes millions is producing the wealth he takes home. Contrast that to a Goldman Sachs CEO who destroys the economy, causes mass unemployment, wrecks people's retirement accounts, and still walks away with $18.6 million in compensation for one year. How exactly did he produce that wealth?

Finally, even those of us who do produce great wealth, can only do so because of the countless generations that came before us and brought us from the Stone Age to the Internet Age. We can only live in luxury instead of fighting for basic survival and dying horribly at 30 because of their efforts. That is why every generation, even yours, has a duty to make the world a slightly better place than you found it. What exactly about this philosophy do you find objectionable?

Dan, thanks for your well stated posts. I'm going on vacation. I'll respond when I return. DOWN WITH THE TSA.

Honest Abe says

I formally declare the myth of debunking the selfmade man myth is debunked.

I don't think that anecdotal fallacies can debunk anything.

Honest Abe says

DOWN WITH THE TSA.

On that we agree 100%. The TSA is pure evil.

John Bailo says

This is what Holden Caulfield would have said in 1989.

More like Tony Montana in 1983.

leoj707 says

Honest Abe says

I formally declare the myth of debunking the selfmade man myth is debunked.

I don't think that anecdotal fallacies can debunk anything.

I don't think Abe was using an anecdote. He was using some counter-examples, which is perfectly valid. However, this counter-examples don't represent the ruling 0.1% class. The counter-examples are inventors, not capital, and by that I mean

- venture capitalists
- speculators
- brokers
- financial product "developers"
- executives including CEOs
- lobbyists

I would say that all of the examples were workers, i.e. producers of wealth, rather than people who controlled funding, distribution, or a scarce resource (typically a public resource or one that is artificially scarce like land or diamonds).

The best thing about our economy is that inventors and real innovators -- and I say real because that term is often co-op'd by charlatan -- can still make it big. Of course, they don't make it 0.1% big. Even the best inventions don't make their inventors into billionaires.

So I would say that the noble success stories do not reflect the parasites that the 99% are upset with. They are entirely different groups.

I don't mind reducing regulation to help the small guy. There's a theory that states regulations actually help large corporations by eliminating competition from smaller firms that can't absorb the cost of regulation. And to a large extent, that is true.

However, "regulation" is just another word for "law". Don't you hate all those copyright/trademark regulations, those regulations preventing you from making "unauthorized" withdraws from banks, regulations preventing you from taking your next door neighbor's shinny things?

However, I would rather replace the existing regulations, which are simply micromanagement attempts, with smaller and simpler laws that address the fundamental problems rather than the symptoms. If a bill has a thousand tiny rules, big corporations will have the time and money to find loopholes. If a bill is short, simple, and to the cause of the problem, then big corporations can't avoid it.

The best example I can give is changing the capital gains tax to be: max(0.0, 1.00 - 0.01 * m) where m is the number of months an equity/property is held. This would eliminate all bubbles, micro-trading, and speculation as it would be impossible to profit from them. At the same time, it would greatly encourage real investment by making it tax free. And in doing so, it would greatly increase the stability and productivity of the economy.

And the reason it works is that it addresses the root cause of the problem. The problem is that short-term zero sum games dominate our financial markets. The solution is therefore to eliminate the very motivation for short-term zero sum games without harming long-term, positive sum games.

leoj707 says

John Bailo says

This is what Holden Caulfield would have said in 1989.

More like Tony Montana in 1983.

I thought the reference was obvious, but evidently not everyone got it, which surprises me because it's such a long quote that it goes a little too far for what I was using it for.