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Originally posted by CardiacCoug
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A Kenyan in Reno earned a masters in wildlife biology after emigrating here with less than $100. He drives cab because it makes him a better living than any biologist job he can get. A Somali immigrant is shining shoes in the Denver Airport, putting himself through the last year of an engineering degree because the degree he earned in Africa isn't recognized here. It took him 5 years to get him and his family here. Both of these guys (and every other immigrant I talk too, without exception) think America is the greatest country in the world, and it's easier to get ahead here than any other country. The most inspiring person I talked to was a shoe shine in St. Louis who lives in Ferguson. His father left when he was twelve, so he dropped out of school and learned to shine shoes. As a shoe shine, he helped support his family and paid for both his sisters to go to college. Now he has two kids of his own, one an engineer, and one in her last year of law school at Georgetown, and he has done it all by sacrificing, saving, and shining a hell of a lot of shoes (shiniest my boots have ever been, incidentally). I could go on, but my point is that there are a lot of people who have climbed the ladder out of poverty.
One of the largest farmers in the valley is a man whose grandfather came here from Mexico illegally to work in the sugarbeet fields. His son began working as a sharecropper, and now his grandson has built the farm into a 10,000 irrigated acre operation. This is probably the best argument for eliminating, or at least limiting, the estate tax. The current farmer would never have been able to build his place had he been forced to pay $1,000,000 to the IRS upon his father's death.
One of the best middle class to riches story is Michael Rubin, co-owner of the 76ers and one of the country's richest men, with a net worth of $2.7 billion. He turned a $17,000 loan from a friend into $75,000, and in 20 years grew one of the most successful businesses in the country. He also happens to live with one of Manhattan's most beautiful women.
America is replete with these kinds of stories. True, not everyone can get rich, but most everyone can get ahead if they work hard, and they can certainly help their posterity ahead on the socioeconomic ladder if both they and their posterity are determined to do so. Wealth is a different story, and involves the addition of risk, which not everyone is comfortable with, but wealth is also achievable, especially if it is a multi-generational effort.
To me, the bigger question is how taking money from the rich will help the poor get ahead. Aside from education, I can't think of a way that reallocating the capital of the wealthy will effect this change. That's the thing about wealth - it doesn't just sit. It is invested, and it becomes capital that is used to build business. The competition for that capital is what makes its allocation effective. It goes to the enterprise that has the greatest probability for growth and jobs. Taking that competition away and re-allocating wealth to those in need, may help the poor in the short run, but it comes at a cost of reducing the number of available high-paying jobs, which is what the poor need in the long run. As a caveat, I firmly hold to the notion of Friedman that the one thing government does right is fund education, as an educated society is more likely to be a productive and wealthy society.
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