I saw a video last night that really made my blood boil. It was businessman Kevin O’Leary (pretty well known venture capitalist on the TV show Shark Tank) claiming how happy he was that the wealthiest 85 people in the world have an equal amount of wealth as the poorest 3.5 billion. Yes, with a ‘B’. Also known as “half of the world’s population”. Here’s the video, for reference.

Fun fact – the top “1%” have enough combined wealth to end world hunger four times over.

First, let me say that I know exactly the point he was trying to make. It wasn’t O’Leary saying how happy he is that much of the world’s population lives in abject poverty (his personality suggests a much more apathetic outlook towards those statistics). I think his point was that the ‘1%’ should be a role model for those much less fortunate, to take the steps to become rich themselves. He claims they should seize the ‘opportunity’ and attempt to become rich like him.

The problem is that this so-called opportunity doesn’t exist, or it exists on such an unrealistic level that it borders on fantasy.

In the mind of the ‘opportunist’, every person is afforded unlimited chance to step out of a lower standard of living, create or invest in some kind of business, and “strike gold”, thus becoming rich and once again proving the everlasting and almighty system of capitalism.

Then comes the trouble with this theory, however. Ask yourself seriously – how many factory workers, fast food employees, retail workers, and even common businesspeople have the ‘opportunity’ to go out on their already relatively low wages and risk their financial well-being (which is most often the ability to feed their families), simply to have the chance at starting a business, which has a 75% chance of soon failing anyways assuming it even gets off the ground [at least says a Harvard study], in which case they may end up making around double what they were making before, with twice the work?Furthermore, O’Leary was speaking on an international scale. How, in all honesty, does he expect the hundreds of millions to billions of those who can barely afford to feed their families to be able to drop everything and take the unavoidable ‘risk’ in the pursuit of riches? And he calls this “fantastic”?

In this, the ‘realists’ of the matter can pretty definitively claim that the well known ‘opportunity’, which basks in the complete and total praise of most of the “right-wing”, does not exist in the way they believe it to. Can I physically get up, spend my money, and start on my way to becoming part of the 1%? Absolutely; I have the opportunity. Is it realistic for most of the world? The answer is an astounding “NO”. I’m getting married in July, and quite honestly, I could never even think about putting myself or my future wife (or children) in that kind of position where I could possibly be unable to provide for them in the ways which I need.

Let’s assume that I had put money away for years in a deposit to start my own business, which is a method even I can admit is more intelligent than simply “going for it”. Unfortunately, the mathematical and logical proof remains against me that anything will indeed happen. The average small business is worth something like 1 million dollars USD. That’s not a lot, by the way. Is that worth the immense amount of time, effort, money, and livelihood I’m putting into it? Perhaps, that’s your prerogative. If money isn’t the issue in the first place, then you are likely not one of those whom I’m trying to talk to here. Logically, by the way, there are many more sound choices, especially with the way the market is shifting today.

Security or success have never been promised to us, but let’s not doom ourselves to the opposite simply because we can.