Life’s Lottery

To the Editor:
The Herald published a Letter to the Editor June 10 titled ‘President Obama’s Curious Vision’ in which the writer took Obama to task for saying three things; that no one builds a business by himself, if you like your doctor you can keep him and that we all live under life’s lottery.
Unfortunately for the writer, Obama was essentially right on all three counts.
The first should be clearly true to all. Name one business which doesn’t use anything that was made by other people, like telephones or roads or cell towers or computers or offices or pens, etc. In addition, try naming all the significant businesses which don’t have employees. Whenever anyone starts a business, he relies on an entire system, all of which entail other people doing other jobs, and he almost always hires others. No one, and certainly not Obama, is denying that individual input is important, that entrepreneurship is to be scoffed at. The issue is how we think of it. Do we view it as the result of one person’s efforts or do we see it as a shared effort, with different people inputting things of different value, and how do we distribute the rewards of the business to the others who have contributed? Do we want the distributions that we had in the 50s when the economy was roaring and middle class incomes rising steadily, or do we want the distributions since the 80s when we cut taxes for the rich and incomes for the bottom 80 percent have been essentially flat, or the distributions of today where the top 1 percent take 90 percent of all the gain in income? That’s the issue.
Secondly, almost everyone has kept his doctor under the Obama’s ACA. I know of no one, and have heard very few who have been forced to switch doctors because of the ACA.
As to life’s lottery, well, without boasting, I should say that although I was born to poor parents who had little education (sixth grade for Dad), I was able to retire at 52 and live off other people’s work (a.k.a. capital gains, dividends and interest). Why? Well, I’d love to say that it was all my doing, but the plain fact is that I’m reasonably attractive, reasonably athletic, reasonably intelligent, and perhaps most importantly, I was fortunate to be born white and to parents who encouraged education. It was genes, in short, life’s lottery. Thus I was able to save and invest and then make a reasonable amount of money on Wall St.
Hard work? Kind of. Skill? Some, of course, but to be perfectly honest, it was mostly luck and good genes.
So, Obama was dead on, on all three counts, but that shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who actually thinks about it.