Samira wrote:
People who are suddenly given a larger amount of money than they ever had before - lotto winners and what not - are not also magically given the ability to understand and handle money. This is true. That knowledge is usually acquired over a lifetime.
Smash denied that there was any skill involved at all. That it was just "luck".
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But that all goes back to one's background and opportunities, and none of that is inconsistent with what Smash said in the first place.
Smash suggested an experiment in which a lottery was held at birth, and granted random children 1000 times the average wealth of the nation. It's an interesting one because you're both right, but not in ways you guys would likely want to talk about. That money will help out the child *if* the parents of the child also had the experience and approach to money that will help them obtain and retain it. Which is a wonderful argument for inheritance, but of course the left hates that as well.
If you just give random babies a ton of money at birth, they'll have random parents, who will statistically spend all the money before the kid ever gets any. If we assume they can't touch it, then they'll still not teach the kid how to handle the money, and said kid will blow it all in the same manner lotto winners do, upon his/her 18th birthday.
There's really no way for Smash's scenario to work. And if you stop and spend any amount of time thinking about it, you'll admit it. But it's a nice bit of fantasy that those who support wealth redistribution like to cling to, so they'll tend to ignore the facts. Those facts are that people accumulate and retain wealth because of their own actions. Yes, being born into wealth and taught how to manage it helps, but the idea that random distribution will ever work at all, much less "better" is just plain stupid.