World's richest woman says poor should have less fun, work harder. Calls for lower minimum wage and tax cuts

[Mr Khan]

Immortal said:

HappySqurriel said:
Its insensitive and not politically correct but it is not inherently wrong ...

While becoming "Bill Gates Rich" involves a lot of exceptional things to line up for you, the basic process of climbing the economic ladder involves showing up, doing the work that is required of you, and trying to get along with your co-workers/other students and boss/teacher.

Anyone can end up being "poor" for a period of their life due to misfortune, but almost no one stays "poor" for a long period of time without their decisions and attitude playing a major role in it. Certainly we all may "fail" in life but the difference between those who are successful and those who are not is often based on who tries again. There is a long list of successful people who were successful simply because they were willing to fail more than anyone else.

We would mock a 40 year old man who never had a girlfriend who made up countless excuses why he never put any effort into attracting women and yet deserved to be with a "perfect 10", and yet we completely tolerate people making similar excuses why they never put any effort into their career but deserve to be wealthy.

 

I don't necessarily disagree with you, but do you really have any evidence for this? I mean, this is the normal right-wing argument; the poor are poor because they don't work hard enough or something to this effect. The general leftist response is either that a) they do work hard and the system is rigged to make sure they get nowhere while doing so or b) they don't work hard because they have experienced no benefit from working hard and have stopped bothering.

Idealistically, I'd like to go with your rhetoric since the idea seems to be that people are the masters of their own fate and that we aren't completely bound by circumstance, but are you entirely convinced that's the reality of the situation in general?

For your second paragraph, the liberal answer would probably be that few poor people are in the situation you described and that the majority put effort into their career and still get nowhere, rather giving them something of a right to complain about being poor.

Bingo. I mean, some people are just lazy, bad people (but i find that those people tend to be evenly distributed across all walks of life regardless of race/religion/economic status, like this woman who represents in her strata the same type of lazy good-for-nothing as the guy on welfare who keeps trying to scam Italian Ice off me in my job), but a lot of people are well-meaning, but have been beaten down into nihilism. Tasting the bitterness of the employment system since i've graduated (and bear in mind i'm only 3.5 months out of college, and already bitter), i can sympathize. "If you work hard, you'll get somewhere" is an aggregate, long-run thing, and it's easy at any point in that grueling journey to just give up and indulge in the quicker pleasures that surround us.