Your experience is anecdotal. Surely you can understand why basing opinions and worldviews on pure anecdote is problematic, yes?

>>None of us are equal in any way, and none of us ever will be. You might as well decry the fact that some people are taller, or have an eye color that you prefer, or keep a head full of hair into old age. In a just (my definition of that word, not necessarily yours) society, we are equal in one respect alone: equal before the law.

Nobody argues that everyone is equal in terms of physical and personal characteristics. What is important however is for everyone to have equal opportunity. If you come from a well-off family who pays for your college, you are an order of magnitude better off than someone who had to take student loans. While you were studying for your classes and partying (or otherwise networking) in your spare time, they were working several minimum wage jobs. Similarly, after college, your job prospects will be better, not only because of higher grades (due to having had more time to study) but also parental connections, which may have landed you internships during summer breaks or full-time jobs after graduation.

If we move beyond anecdotes and look at the data, we see that it supports my argument. Do a Google search for social mobility in the USA and you will see that those who come from poor families are much less likely to proceed to middle class or higher throughout their lifetime. This is not because they are shorter or dumber or start balding at an early age, but because they did not have the same opportunities and therefore could not make as big of a jump as people who had better means.

Your experience is dependent on several factors including how willing you are to listen to and engage people with different lives than your own. I can close my eyes and shout that there are no colors, but that doesn't invalidate everyone else's experience. Don't pretend like you have an authoritative background to make general conclusions.

Where you start in life matters. It squares with the things I've observed in my own life; hardworking people who spend every waking hour working for the betterment of their friends and family are nevertheless constantly battered by mischance and bad fortune. I've learned to differentiate the good luck that I possess in my own life from the bad luck that others have. Despite my continued work in supporting them with financial aid, useful contacts, and marketable skills, they are still forced by circumstance to end up destitute.

At this point, some might say, "you didn't earn your brain/parent's money/etc." I say that's nonsense, because the entire idea of "earn" arises in order to distinguish real people who choose to act toward a goal from those that choose not to. And of course, that is the point. None of these things were earned. This is a basic framing problem[1], and the entire basis of chaos theory[2]. Initial conditions matter. A proper scientific experiment includes a control group measured against an experimental group, and both of these groups are impossible to meaningfully distinguish at the beginning of the observation. If this is not the case, say because one group is more intelligent by some accepted measure of intelligent, then the measurement of a variable, say the application of choice to arrive at earnings, becomes utterly nonsensical. The causative agent could be either the initial difference or the experimental variable.

Using simplistic philosophical bases for one's beliefs is tantamount to unexamined religious dogma and in no way demonstrates any kind of empirical basis. Furthermore, claiming to have surveyed "bums to billionaires" without proof is merely, in the sophistic style of javert, a logical fallacy.

But it's cute you two believe you have any grasp of epistemology, rhetoric, or logic.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framing_(social_sciences)#Exper...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory