An early idea is that skills and hard work get someone a professorship or a BMW, but one needs skills +work+ a lot of luck to get a bestseller or private jet. There is a winner-take-all-effect. Well, the tax system taxes people on skills and work (current income) and gives them a break on luck (capital gains). I am not favoring taxes but, assuming one needs to tax, they got it exactly backwards.

A virtuous success is one that takes nothing away from someone else and, more generally, does not translate into any form of failure in others.
(This is completely incompatible with modernism [Part IV, Ethics])

When a person repeatedly talks about someone else, listen by inverting the meaning.

Algazel (a.k.a. Al Ghazali, الغزالی), the Arab (Arabic language) philosopher who figured out “Hume’s problem” ~700 years before Hume) also spelled out Adam Smith’s “pin factory” ~650 years before Smith. I am convinced that Adam Smith merely repeated Algazel’s idea as Arab philosophers were well-known in Latin translation. This passage is from Ihya2 3loum ad-din, in which he manages to mix theology, economics, and natural order.
Note that he is one who wrote The Incoherence of Philosophers in an attack on rationalism (Aristotelian-Averroan) –still unsurpassed.

Wall Photos

Your success depends far less on your own skills than on the mistakes of others.