To Have and to Have Not

Anyone who's kept up with me over the past few years might have noticed a pretty marked conservative shift in my thinking over the past few years. While in high school and the early part of college, I definitely was leaning pretty strongly in favor of socialism, recently I've begun gravitating more towards libertarianism or neo-liberalism. In Resurrection, Tolstoy makes the observation that people tend to adapt their moral beliefs to justify their profession. A prostitute, he claims, believes that she is performing a most necessary duty for humanity, as men first and foremost need sexual satisfaction. I can't say I've had too many interactions with prostitutes, so I'll just have to trust Tolstoy on this one.

Since getting out of college, I've decided to embark on a career in finance. I chance job offer in Oklahoma got me started down the path, where I found that it's actually a really interesting subject and I am not all that bad at it, despite very little formal training. As a result, finance has become my most recent obsession, taking the place of Russian literature. Naturally, my views on economic policy have shifted a bit as I've learned a bit about it. Living in the remains of "Socialist Paradise" has also made a strong impression on my world view, as every day, I see the legacy of 70 years of socialist rule. In any case, over the past few months, there has been one question that still gnaws at me, probably one of the central questions in defining a person's political outlook: why are some people rich and some people poor?

Before I embarked on my journey to the heart of the financial beast, I generally attributed social inequality to dumb luck. I have met more than my share of rich idiots, who have landed cushy jobs merely through of family connections and massive inheritances to boot. On the other hand, I've met plenty of smart, ambitious people, who for whatever reason will remain poor for the rest of their lives. Take Verkhny Lomov, the Russian village I visited a few weeks back. If you are born in a village with in the middle of nowhere, with no indoor plumbing, limited educational opportunities, odds are you won't be able to rise out of it, no matter how brilliant you are. Even when you think about it, genetic gifts boil down to little more than pure and simple dumb luck. My tag line from that era was, "What separates me from a poor, crippled, Somali orphan? Luck."

However, on the other end of the spectrum, we have to realize that life just isn't fair. One thing that annoys me about American society, as anyone who reads this blog might pick up on, is the tendency for Americans to complain. I mean, really, life in America is not all that hard. It's designed not to be. In the summer of '07, when I was in California, one person who I talked a great deal to was my brother's bitter, 45-year old, unemployed roommate Joe. Joe grew up around Chicago in a working class family. Dropped out of High School and moved out to California on a whim. I guess he worked a bunch of odd jobs and at some point along the way got a GED, except like every other bitter, stupid liberal, he fancied himself to be much smarter and more educated than he really was. All he ever wanted to do was bitch about how the system was fixed. For the first day or two, it was interesting to have a lively debate. It quickly dawned on me, that he spent his life sitting in front of a computer, reading the latest conspiracy theory blog, churning over the same-old, ridiculous ideas. At the end of the day, Joe is 45, unmarried, unemployed, studying at community college and living off student loans. While unquestionably, there may have been some circumstances in his life that made him less likely to succeed in life, he still could've done much more to improve his lot. Really, is it anyone else's fault that he is bitter and miserable or did he just piss away every opportunity he was given?