> Horatio Alger may be fiction
No, Horatio Alger was extremely real. He was an author.
The funny thing is, Horatio Alger wrote no "Horatio Alger stories".
The classic Horatio Alger story is like the guys I mentioned: young
man gets rich through hard work.
The actual stuff Horatio Alger wrote was more a socialist's parody of
that: young man gets rich through marrying the boss's daughter.
> and success may have as much to
> do with luck as with hard work (honest capitalists never claim
> otherwise), but it clear can and does happen.
Many honest capitalists also point out that you shouldn't give luck
only one chance to happen to you. There are any number of rich
people who will tell you they started on a shoestring -- and the
shoestring broke. So they worked as employees for a few years and
saved up enough money to buy another shoestring. And maybe the third
or fourth shoestring actually held up long enough to get rich off of.
What? With the socialists claiming that under capitalism an employee
can't save enough in a lifetime to become a business owner, I'm
claiming that under capitalism an employee can do so IN A FEW YEARS?
Yep. Absolutely.
My own father did so at least three times between
1960 and 1974. (Unfortunately he was a lousy businessman, and never
managed to make the shoestring hold up; basically both his business
and the family he was raising had to live off his savings.)
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