I recently came across this on a forum, and just wanted to know what your thoughts on this are. It seems to imply that children are limited to that which their parents earn or do. To what extent is this true?
"__Britain is the country where a father’s income is most likely to determine his children’s future incomes. So what you say is not entirely true: the family you’re born into has more effect on your future career and income than your own hard work."
It’s a non sequitur.
It’s probably true that there is an empirical correlation between your father’s income and yours. It doesn’t follow that ‘hard’ (and creative and so on and so forth) work can’t help. If he/she want’s to proof that; than (s)he has to prove that ‘hard working’ was an independent variable, i.e. that there was no difference in ‘hard work’ between people from low income families and high income families.
Furthermore; ‘hard work’ doesn’t get you rich. Producing value does.
Furthermore; libertarians shouldn’t feel reluctant to recognize these kind of statistics correlations; we just need to point out the enormous amount of government intervention that distorts the meritocratic character of the market, i.e. minimum wage laws, public education, privileges, etc.
Its true that there is a strong correlation between the income of a father and his children… It is not true that what a father earns determines what his children earn.
The only things that determine what his children earn are thier behaviors. It is true that a childs behaviors are strongly influenced by thier parents genes and learned behavior.
You cant do anything about the genes, but you can change your learned behavior.
It might very well be the case now, I imagine this sort of thing would be easier to avoid absent the income tax.
The height, weight, and IQ of children are all highly correlated with those of his/her parents. Why would we expect income not to be?