Yes...and it is this "drive" the government removes by giving people just enough to get by. They will never know what they could have accomplished, because their motivation was removed by a government handout.
Jim
I understand what you mean and where you are coming from. IMO, the people with the drive to boot strap themselves up from nothing are not interested in a free ride. They have an "I will not be denied" attitude. And, they let little get in their way.
As an example there were these two college buddies. Right out of school the begged and borrowed $110,000 from friends and relatives for their business venture. That venture was and is called CornWall Capital. Their idea? Event driven investing. That is world markets can't adjust quickly enough to bad news thus creating opportunities in mispriced options, commodities, stocks and bonds. ( BP was agood example of this with the price barely moving for daysafter they punched a hole in bottem of the ocean) It's also known as Black Swan Investing.
Understand that these two kids weren't genius material. They made big mistakes, like failing to close open positions. Do that in the commodities market and you have to take delivery of what ever commodity you've we long in the market. They learned that after taking possession of two railcars full of corn. Or was it wheat? Dah!!!! None the less, just a detail.
But the boys did well. In two years they turned that $110,000 into $15,000,000. Still Institutional Wall Street wouldn't talk to the two cornbobs from the midwest. They weren't big enough to bother with. So CornWall decided to get taken seriously they'd move to NY. And they did. Of course, not knowing any better, it was to an office in the Village where you had to walk thru a restaurant kitchen on the first floor to reach their office on the second floor. Not impressive! No problem just a detail. They hired a quant to analyse ideas. They hired a guy no one else wanted and promised him a piece of the payoff when they were right. This allowed them to pay him a very low salary.
Finally the boys got a big investment bank to listen to them. They, or more so, their quant, saw a problem in the mortgage market. The bank saw it too and had designed a derivitative financial instument to take advantage of it. To short the mortgage market. The boys put their entire stake into it. They were that sure the market was going to crack. And sure enough a year or so later it did. They had nothing to do with the collapse itself. But they made well over $100,000,000 profit by putting their money where their research was.
Today, about six or seven years after their founding Cornwall has grown from $110,000 to About $300,000,000.
Again, an I will not be denied attiude and not letting obstacles like loaded railcars get in their way got them to where they are.
