What We Did Not Earn

by Patrick Appel

Sam Harris is getting pummelled by readers for his comments on inequality, wealth, and taxation:

Many of my critics pretend that they have been entirely self-made. They seem to feel responsible for their intellectual gifts, for their freedom from injury and disease, and for the fact that they were born at a specific moment in history. Many appear to have absolutely no awareness of how lucky one must be to succeed at anything in life, no matter how hard one works. One must be lucky to be able to work. One must be lucky to be intelligent, to not have cerebral palsy, or to not have been bankrupted in middle age by the mortal illness of a spouse.

Many of us have been extraordinarily lucky—and we did not earn it. Many good people have been extraordinarily unlucky—and they did not deserve it. And yet I get the distinct sense that if I asked some of my readers why they weren’t born with club feet, or orphaned before the age of five, they would not hesitate to take credit for these accomplishments. There is a stunning lack of insight into the unfolding of human events that passes for moral and economic wisdom in some circles.

Fellow atheist Timothy Sandefur is enraged. A sample of his many criticisms:

[Harris] believes that because people are “lucky” enough to be born with certain endowments, they must be reduced by force to being the means to other people’s happiness—literally forced, since he believes the state should “supersede” our “immediate, selfish interests” to accomplish a “fairness” that he does not define, but admits is based purely on emotion and intuition.