The oft-repeated myth of the self-made man. "I was born to poor parents and now I'm uber-wealthy and I did it all myself!"

No, you didn't. Say you were born lower-middle class in America. You're in a country which has grown fat on the work of slaves and the imperialist exploitation of weaker nations. You went to school funded by blue-collar families in your town who had to budget carefully to get a monthly trip to a restaurant. On roads they also paved.

Your parents sacrificed for every meal, pair of pants, and Christmas gift. They may have paid for your higher education.

In a country where you can say whatever you want and even open your own business. Because a bunch of young men with bright futures ended up face-down in the mud of a battle-field to secure these freedoms.

You didn't get polio because generations before worked tirelessly to find a vaccine. You didn't die of appendicitis because surgeons kept cutting open the doomed in a desperate effort to save them, until they finally learned how to.

Nobody can just throw you out of your mansion at the point of a gun because thousands of cops have taken a bullet to ensure that we are secure in our persons and our possessions.

Your brain - which is so productive it made you lots of money - inherited an intellectual legacy beginning with Ancient Greece, Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, India... You know a thousand things it took millenia to figure out.

And even now, should - God forbid - you feel a pain in your chest, you can dial 3 digits on your phone and your fellow humans will rush to your house with life-saving equipment. They won't ask if you have any money.

You're not self-made, nobody is. You may have been born poor, but you got one hell of an inheritance.