I think part of what he is saying is right. You can only work "profitably" if you have "resources" available to you. Take farming. Guess what, no matter how good at it you are, no matter how hard a worker, no matter how much you deserve to succeed, without land\seeds\water\ect, you can't get a start to prove yourself with and make a profit. So you get pushed into share cropping instead, which goes nowhere, at least for you...
Trapped by "commitments" you "freely" entered into... true on one level in a way but it's just not that simple. And who has\doesn't have resources in life? Who share crops and who owns the plantation? Is it a meritocracy? Do those who are most deserving get allocated more? Somewhat, hence the idea of profiting\bankruptcy. But also most of the people who can rise up in such a system have resources given to them to invest, probably by their parents. Invest in themselves (a chance at education), in a business, in many different ways. The opposite, those who are given little, give you the term "crushing poverty", were upon you will almost certainly share crop (and remain crushingly poor) or perish.
There's no easy magic solution, but at the same time trapping people into a world where they must submit to a life of drudgery (whether through physical labor, mental anguish, or both) in order to access resources held by those who were just given them... seems wrong. Perhaps instead we should work to push up the "bottom class"? Say, use technology and progress to bring us to a productive and equitable enough state everyone can have a great education, at least so far as they can prove themselves worthy of. I think it is clear that given human nature this will never happen... but that doesn't mean we can't dream that no one has to become a drone, nor decry the perpetuation of the share cropping system, in all it's forms.
Trapped by "commitments" you "freely" entered into... true on one level in a way but it's just not that simple. And who has\doesn't have resources in life? Who share crops and who owns the plantation? Is it a meritocracy? Do those who are most deserving get allocated more? Somewhat, hence the idea of profiting\bankruptcy. But also most of the people who can rise up in such a system have resources given to them to invest, probably by their parents. Invest in themselves (a chance at education), in a business, in many different ways. The opposite, those who are given little, give you the term "crushing poverty", were upon you will almost certainly share crop (and remain crushingly poor) or perish.
There's no easy magic solution, but at the same time trapping people into a world where they must submit to a life of drudgery (whether through physical labor, mental anguish, or both) in order to access resources held by those who were just given them... seems wrong. Perhaps instead we should work to push up the "bottom class"? Say, use technology and progress to bring us to a productive and equitable enough state everyone can have a great education, at least so far as they can prove themselves worthy of. I think it is clear that given human nature this will never happen... but that doesn't mean we can't dream that no one has to become a drone, nor decry the perpetuation of the share cropping system, in all it's forms.