No, it's more like because the parents weren't prepared or chose not to properly pay for what their child was worth.
That's not a question. It's not a matter of what you deserve. It's a matter of fate. It's something that cannot be controlled nor does it determine an individuals happiness in the long run.
I can say from a first-hand perspective that a good majority of the world's impoverished are the happiest people on the planet.
Really? You've managed to meet the majority of the world's poor people in your 17 years on this Earth? Or you just don't know what "first-hand" means?
Actually there are numerous studies that show people's happiness is at its lowest level when they're poorest. It keeps rising with income until you hit middle class and then it mostly levels off. Increases in income above the middle class result in very small additional gains in happiness. But common sense should tell you this much, shouldn't it? All other things being equal, the person who doesn't have to choose between medicine and food will be happier than the one who does.
Of course, like all actual evidence that doesn't match up with what you believe, these facts will be discarded in your mind and replaced with cobbled together anecdotes and assumptions that fake smiles store clerks are required by company policy to flash at you are evidence of happiness.
There's nothing wrong with being poor. That's where I stand. It's only a problem today because the laws inflate the cost of living artificially and prevent one of minimal skill to sustain themselves. Their is not a safety net in this society. There is only a prison for those who are lesser off. The corporatist governments have cut the lower rungs of the ladder and have told people they can only jump. Some do successfully. Most do not.
Sorry but nobody is entitled to an easy life start. It should be inherent since most people easily gain valuable skills. In an ideal society, I would imagine most companies training its employees from the very beginning. It shouldn't take economic slavery (taxation) to get people up and running. It's only like this because the cost of education, again, is overinflated by our corporatist paradigm.
In any case, I appreciate where you come from. We both want the society be a happier place; however, we have very different perspectives.
See, this is the problem with hardcore ideologues. Their beliefs are more important than results. Living in a tar paper shack with no running water or electricity and working for less than minimum wage with no health benefits is preferable to what things are like for the average person in, say, Western Europe today. Because those people who enjoy a healthy modern standard of living are SLAVES to taxes! Really, Atlas. Why don't you take a step back and look at those two living situations objectively and tell me which one sounds more like the life of a slave.
I don't think you want society to be a happier place at all. If you did, you'd believe in something that benefited more than 1% of society. Your response to people pointing out massive inequalities in the current system and the obvious exacerbation of those problems in your preferred system is to essentially shrug, say "life's not fair", and call them jealous. Your response to the problems of poverty is to try to redefine poverty to such a low level that only the most destitute of Sub-Saharan Africans would qualify. In fact, your whole solution to poverty is literally a smug "hey buddy, you could be poorer!" You're fine with creating conditions where a worker has little or no choice but to sign on for a job that will break him physically, emotionally, and spiritually while his employer makes 50 times more money from his work than what he gets paid. But taxing that factory owner enough that he won't be able to afford a second helicopter for his yacht and using that money to benefit the workers he's exploiting is STEALING and STEALING IS BAD.
Of course, in Atlas' fairy tale capitalism, the business owners will reward hard work and not just exploit you to death. And any evidence of them doing exactly that at every opportunity in the past, present, or future is somehow the government's fault. It doesn't even have to make sense. You can even blame the regulations that keep workers safe for employers exploiting their workers. If you attack corporations, that's the government's fault because of limited liability. When you point out private companies that do the same shit, well, that somehow ends up being the government's fault, too. Probably those pesky safety regulations again.
Here's a preview of Atlas' first job: he works his ass off, but it doesn't matter because everyone he works with thinks he's a pompous jerk who constantly uses and misuses big words to make himself seem smart and disguise how simplistic his worldview really is. He gets fired officially for being five minutes late, but really because nobody could stand him. He somehow manages to blame this on the government.