Luck is the most generically accurate, but ultimately it does come down to birth lottery, as someone can just be born poor and disabled and no amount of post-birth luck is going to fix that.
I'm not rich. But I was born poor and am no longer poor. The Birth Lottery blessed me with a brain, and with that as my only asset, I learned esoteric skills which I can parley into a niche career.
But more importantly, the social safety net in my country allowed me to get an education without becoming a wage slave for the rest of my life. Without that, I couldn't have pulled this escape from poverty off.
I now run my own business. We have no employees -- only owners who have self-invested. Our business is growing and I anticipate a comfortable retirement. Haven't got rich off the working class either.
So, thank you Canada for the opportunities. I've tried to make the most of them.
How do you run a business without employees? What kind of business is that? Just because you call someone a self-invested owner doesn't mean they aren't an employee. The only types of businesses I've heard of like this are Mary Kay and AmWay (there may be others I don't know). Basically a sales ponzi scheme where you are the wholesaler for a distributor and the "self-invested owner" bought their products from you instead of directly from the wholesaler.
I do agree with your stance on the state of education today but not in the same way. Some people party all through school and live off loans while others work during school to avoid loans. For every 1 person that takes the opportunity seriously and busts their ass to make something of themselves, there are 9 people who don't deserve the free pass. Making it free for everyone costs too much for those who have to pay for those 9.
Capitalism just has a feedback loop bug. In capitalism, resources are distributed based on capital. But capital is a resource. So you get more capital for having more capital. In any business, who gets the most money that business generates? Whoever had the most money to buy into it. No work, no expertise is involved in the equation.
You might or might not be referring to the fact that Monopoly was originally made to showcase exactly that; the impossibility of living under such a system.
Or they could be employed at those places and get stock as a benefit. My current job is that way. It is still risky to keep a lot of eggs in one basket, but it can pay off if your employer is a newer publicly traded company.
Own something valuable and then borrow against that thing. Easiest example would be to own stock worth say a thousand dollars and borrow a hundred dollars from that stock value you get to keep the stock worth nine hundred dollars growing in value while you pay the one hundred dollar "debt" off. If you ever get to where you could not pay it for some reason, you could always take $100 and pay it off immediately. I've heard this referred to as the buy borrow strategy and some people to avoid taxes will use this perpetually and they call it the buy borrow die strategy. Selling an asset often involves extremely heavy extortion from gangs that we call governments, where borrowing from the value of that asset does not incur such an extortion penalty.
Edit: The most important part though is just to make more than you spend from whatever you do.
Tbf, most tax authorities haven't been completely captured by billionaires and they recognise what your just described as a disguised remuneration package.
It works even in the United States. If you sell a stock within a year of owning it, you get charged like 30% extortion. If you sell it after a year, you get charged your normal extortion rate. And if you borrow from it, you get charged zero extortion.
Tbf I feel like a lot of them work pretty hard at mercilessly exploiting the working class. Like, Space Karen has sent over 20,000 tweets? That's a lot of work tweets!
I hate to be that guy, but not always exactly this. I have relatives that were born dirt poor but are now rich. You can definitely say they exploited people to get that way but the birth lottery gave them nothing financially
You are dumb I agree. Because that's what it takes to make up stories about other people's lives to make yourself feel better.
These were people that literally grew up without indoor plumbing or electricity for years, in a community where owning a car meant you were rich. They were sharecroppers so they owned nothing and slaved away to make rich people money.
But sure they weren't dirt poor because some dickhead on the Internet wanted it to not be true so they could keep generalizing people different than them as all the same.
Yeah it's a bit derivative. Everyone already knows this and agrees with it. It's self evidently true. Nobody ever needs this explained to them, everyone already knows and agrees!