>>>>Everyone person who has achieved some level of success has a different story to tell, and it's often a complex path. But the idea that going to work for someone else means forfeiting their dreams/futures is faulty logic. Going to work for someone, however difficult, is potentially planting the seeds towards achieving a dream.
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>>>The idea that you can work for someone your whole life, and never take the risk or responsibility of working for yourself, and be rewarded for you mediocrity with a life style of the rich and famous would be purely amusing if I didn't see a mob forming.
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>>Selective reading. Kevin said "Going to work for someone, however difficult, is potentially planting the seeds towards achieving a dream." IOW, in order to achieve your dream, you might first have to go to work for someone, whether that's to learn the skills you need, or put together the capital you need.
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>I accept that.
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>Employment can be a means to end.
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>But it isn't the American dream.
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>The American dream is being able to start some kind of entrepreneurial venture without fear of being persecuted by an undemocratic authority.

That may be the version of the American Dream you were raised with. I gave my interpretation earlier in the thread and it doesn't require entrepreneurship.

Wikipedia says "The American Dream is a national ethos of the United States, a set of ideals in which freedom includes the opportunity for prosperity and success, and an upward social mobility achieved through hard work."

I also find this:

James Truslow Adams, in his book The Epic of America, which was written in 1931, stated that the American dream is "that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position." (p.214-215)



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>That's something that meant more to people that were denied it in the old world, and why people are very sensitive to governments impeding it.

My people were denied a whole lot more than just entrepreneurship in the old world. They were also denied the professions, not to mention their lives. America means a lot more to me than starting a business.

Tamar