I'm going to have to disagree with a lot you're saying here, Budd. In the first line, you say that Trump's kids and Hilton's siblings (not Paris herself?) got their advantage at birth and that it is unfair.
Is it?
They didn't have any choice in it. Their fathers or their grandfathers or whoever it was who started the fortune started out with nothing, worked hard to provide a future for their family. The difference between most who think like you and those fortune starters is that they did succeed, you didn't.
The fair or unfair question rests upon what those with the privilege do with it. I hear @MarcDeMesel is pretty wealthy, do you think he, or maybe his daughter, is unfair? Nah, course not, Marc De Mesel is doing good with his wealth, promoting Voluntarism, and does philanthropicnessess... (is that a word?)
Inequality might not be fair, the way it is in our time, but it could be worse.
In the rest of your article you're more nuanced, I noticed, but i don't agree with your conclusion entirely either. You see, it is the limited government power that got us in the inequality mess we're in now. Corporations have taken over a lot of the government's power because they were left too free. The US has taken the Corporation we Dutch had invented and turned them into "persons" for lack of a better word. This shouldn't have happened. Us Dutch people even showed what happened if Corporations were left too free, and got too powerful, with the VOC going bankrupt in 1700 due to its corruption and abuse of power.
A person should be capable of morality, ethics and have a conscience.
Corporations don't have that, their sole purpose is to make as much money as possible.
So the government should have more power to check, regulate and punish corporations and ensure they don't get too good at their purpose or fulfill it in a way that's bad for society.
It should also have the power to do what's necessary to create opportunity within society and an environment in which those who have not, can become those who have. History is pretty clear that if you leave that up to society or "the economy" greed will find a way to abuse freedom to ultimately be able to use the easiest and most profitable business model: Exploitation.
I'm just afraid that with the way our societies work, this is quite impossible.
The people who become politicians and part of the government are 99,9999% of people who shouldn't be allowed to gain any meaningful power in a society. It coincidentally is the same kind of people that turn out to be good at running businesses.
We should completely rethink the way we structure our governments and the people to whom we give the power to govern in our governments.
We should have job requirements for every government position with power and only give those positions to qualified individuals. A minister of agriculture should know everything about agriculture. A minister of infrastructure should know everything about (you guessed it) infrastructure.
We should also have a system in place that makes it impossible for someone in a government position to gain wealth in any way, other than the pre-determined wealth performing this job well earns. Right now, anyone who is able to convince enough people that he/she should be in a position of power in the government will get that position, regardless of their qualifications for it.
THAT is where our problems lie, my friend.
People with no qualifications to do the job they're supposed to be doing getting the positions they have no business being in.
But this is not a new problem for humanity.
In fact our dear old Geek, eeh i mean Greek, Plato wrote a book on it thousands of years ago, and he noted some of the same problems I mentioned in this article. People should read "The Republic" if they're interested in topics like this. Quite revealing, an eye-opener, that in 375BCE they were already wrestling with the paradoxes involved in governing a society fairly and sustainably.
Judging by the problems our society struggles with, the method we use has failed too.
Granted, for those within our (Western) societies, this "experiment" is going better than any that we've tried before, like Totalitarianism, socialism, democracy (of which this form we're using now is the third or fourth "hard fork") and all other attempts we've tried over the past few millennia. But it is still fundamentally flawed and not working, if the goal is to provide society with liberty, equality, justice, and prosperity for all.
The sooner we understand, acknowledge, and accept that the better, and the sooner we can start developing a better way.
Thanks for reading this.
Stay safe and Stay happy!
What an intelligent argument. I'm of the opinion that this submission requires a lot of visibility even beyond this site.
First, it isn't a child's fault, that their parents are prosperous.
Of course businesses are established for the sole purpose of making profits and government have to make policies that would checkmate their excesses.
Unfortunately there's very little we can do when it come to choosing leaders, qualification is spelt differently for different folks.
The same people that cry over underperforming leaders are the same that will still elect 'unqualified' leaders.
In conclusion I will love to believe that all governmental ineptitudes is a direct representation of humans' flaws.
As we are not perfect, our system won't be.