Maybe something got lost in translation but your inclusion of this one word "unfair" depresses me.
[1] I had "effort and intelligence" here, but I don't think "intelligence" belongs. Our human capital is the hours of life that we are given here on this earth. Free will is what we choose to do with those hours. Getting a better outcome from the same hours of labor, just because of the composition of your parents' DNA, isn't fair. It might be natural and inevitable, but that doesn't mean it's fair.
The more I see in life, the more I question how valid a concept "free will" really is, and to what extent we really "choose what to do with those hours." I'm not prepared to say there's no such thing as free will, but just the way people's behavior changes under the influence of chemicals, or in response to brain damage, suggests that we don't have a satisfying theory of why people make the choices they do.
I keep meaning to re-read John Rawls's A Theory of Justice. What he said about making social policy from behind "the veil of ignorance" makes so much more sense to me now than it did when I read it in law school. (Back then I was much more conservative, and a fan of Robert Nozick's response, Anarchy, State, and Utopia.)
Toiling away for 16 hour days in a factory with no AC isn't necessarily as valuable to others as working from home on computer problems that have huge impact.
And I say this as someone who has done both of those things personally.
And yet, oddly enough, doing the one helped me get the other job. Not many come out of a factory job with a letter of commendation from the company president, after all.
I think it is true that we don't all have equal access to opportunity, and that extent I do think it unfair. My solution to that is to use my advantages to create more opportunities for those who lack the same and I have done this where I was able.
Again, its not. Unless you are stuck in a war zone or in some remote corner of Africa.
Most people in developed and developing nations today have the freedom to make decisions that decide how they are going live their lives. For centuries we've fought and asked for these rights, Now we have them. The fact is most people have fewer reasons to blame for their failures these days. Sooner or later you have to face the fact, you are what you are because of your decisions.
Even the person who works 16 hours at a factory has a choice. It might be a difficult choice, but the person still has some remote chance. The question is do you want to the same work another 15 years from now, or can you do something in your spare time and change that.
There are always going to be some people in that factory who won't be doing the same job 15 years from now, and there are always going to be people who will the same job 15 years from now.
What spare time? Have you tried laboring for long periods of time in very unpleasant conditions? The majority of humanity is engaged in a daily struggle for survival (in fact, for most of them our original state as hunter-gatherers would probably be an improvement). For the majority this condition is not a choice, but mostly a circumstance of the birth lottery.
I actually ended up using all of my vacation time to take a class that helped me churn out some projects that really impressed them on my interview for a much better job.
If it is inevitable but unfair then fairness is not a relevant consideration. Nothing can be done to make a situation more fair if it is inevitable.
They don't 'just' have money. Its not like some fairy shows up on one particular night drops a suitcase full of money outside their doorstep.
Life is full of choices and actions we take.
If a parent slogs all their life to ensure their kids have a good future and another parent doesn't. Then I'm very sorry that's exactly the future these people chose for themselves.
Ironically these are the same people who keep talking of work life balance, quitting jobs and taking care of kids and all that. While somebody else builds a financial empire. In the real life a parent who is always busy but can provide financially is vastly more preferable to kids than some who isn't but stays at home just to take care of them.
Learn to live with your choices and decisions.
How many billionaires exist in the world? Say X000? How does this compare with the world population? You seem to arguing that Y is a failure in life, because X was born to a rich guy.
I wouldn't go to an extent to argue that your initial conditions in life don't have a effect on your future. But at some point of time as you age, that argument just dies.
>> In the end money has no moral weight.
You can either say that and not make money, or go out and earn money. At the end having money would have solved most of your problems and may be even your kids's problem.
Personally, I don't find the Harrison Bergeron definition of 'fair' to be particularly useful. It seems to be questioning things for the mere sake of questioning things. Yes, in the cosmic sense, everything is unfair, but what's your point? Society wasn't made to give everyone equal "cosmic fairness". This is how you create a society where the gifts of peoples' talents and circumstance go unused. By contrast, the people who are disagreeing with you are interested in maximizing the usefulness of these gifts. Improving peoples' circumstances is part of this, but only one part.
How would you resolve this?
Just stuff like that. Different people need different amounts of things. It's not a particularly controversial statement.
Start a business and employ some people.
That depends on precisely how you go about it.
By way of example, a farmer teaching their children how crop rotation works will enable their children to get more crops than other farmers who do not use the technique, even though they work the same acreage. This in turn implies more reward for the same effort. Advances like this are how we build a society of abundance where people have the freedom to devote themselves to music, art, or science without worrying about starving.
The idea that this family's success somehow diminishes the accomplishments of other farmers does not make much sense to me.
Now this is sometimes the case in the real world, for sure. And it's even more often the case that if one farmer starts doing something that works, astute neighboring farmers will observe the improved yields and copy the first one.
However what this model overlooks is the situation where one farmer has complex knowledge that is not obvious to others, and parlays that into an economic advantage. If the more informed farmer leverages the advantage long enough, s/he can end up buying the land off the others as they fall farther and farther behind. Economically efficient in the aggregate, but but far from ideal for those farmers who end up as sharecroppers on the land they used to own, or taking up some other line of work in which they have no special skills.
Even this outcome is not so bad where the advantage is based on actual innovation, but in many contexts economic advantage is derived through political maneuvering or similar, and increased yields often reflect an extraction of economic rents rather than profitable innovation. If you're economically-minded, being a rentier is a shameful position to be in.
Something doesn't quite add up here.
Actually thinking this way will leave the person where they are. There is absolutely no doubt that luck exists. But what sort of logic is this to justify your failure with some one else's luck.
Whatever it is, it's not "simple."
I could describe snatching old ladies' purses as 'simply trying to provide for my children', but that's a deceptive, self-justifying rationalization that begs the question.
If it's "simple", it's not worth thinking about. If it's not, and could possibly be "unfair", then it's shameful to not have thought about it.