Letters to the Editor
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Ownership, blackvegan...
...is an artificial construct. That's pretty much undeniable. The question is whether ownership is a useful construct -- and, again, I think it's a necessary construct for the functioning of society.
I see you've internalized your dad's "hard work reaps rewards" line, and that's fine; it's a powerful form of motivation (and I'm speaking here as a former poor kid, myself). But as we can see from your response to your lottery example, you're clearly slightly uncomfortable with rewards that you don't feel you've sufficiently earned. That's one of the side effects of that particular philosophy, and can be damaging precisely because the unspoken corollary is "rewards are given for hard work." This isn't true. "Rewards" in the form of "wealth" -- and by wealth I mean hard and soft assets -- come from a lot of places, and some of the hardest work is done by people who'll never accumulate much wealth at all.
And that's the trick: someone will always feel that they "deserve" your money more than you do, and someone else will always have more objective need for it than you do. It is necessary for society for us (as a society, if not as individuals) to ignore this reality -- but it's downright ridiculous to act as if possessing wealth is itself a moral virtue, or that spending wealth on comparatively frivolous things is something which someone "deserves" as a consequence of "earning" that wealth.
The distinction between "earned" wealth and "unearned" wealth is one that will always be completely lost on the truly desperate, and which looks fairly flimsy when poked by anybody.