I honestly have no clue where your first interpretation comes from. After reading it again multiple times, I think you're responding to the point that if someone has more they owe more, just badly. :-)

It's not about where your assets or income comes from. (Your statement seemed to imply some point about sales volume, which is utterly irrelevant.)

My point, looking back at your original post, is that there is a threshold below which your "I'm good" level (whether measured financially or in something less quantifiable) is low enough that you really need to focus on yourself and not others, because you need the attention. And there's another threshold above which you're "I'm good" level is high enough that you do, I would argue, have a social obligation to help others whose "I'm good" level is not as high as yours. Where those thresholds are, and what the volume of "help-for-others" is that can reasonably be expected of the second person, is rather squishy and subject to debate. I'm not asserting where those are right now; I'm asserting that they exist. Which is, I think, supporting your original point.

I'll flip this on its head and say to not help and encourage that person to obtain new skills (focus on themselves) so they can eventually work fewer hours and add more value to their community (i.e. get paid more) is worse. I think they would stay perpetually in a state of victimhood if they don't recognize the value of improving themselves and investing in themselves first instead of working like crazy for everyone else.

You're still assuming available bandwidth.

To artificially quantify it the way philosophers love to do: Assume you have 100 action points per week that you can spend on Doing Things(tm). Trying to do more than that is simply not possible. Spending more than 80 points per week leads to self-harm, and your Self Quality (SQ) level declining, because your brain and body need rest time. (SQ is a total made up metric for whatever "work on yourself" mumbo jumbo we're discussing.)

You need to spend some points per week just maintaining your SQ level. Job, eating, taking care of family, etc. That's your maintenance cost. But that is not the same for different people, for reasons that are only sometimes due to that person's own active choices. Economic inequality, disease, random chance, genetic factors, discrimination, sick relatives in a country that tells sick people to fuck off and die (that is, the USA), etc. all mean that a person's maintenance cost can vary widely. Bob's maintenance cost may be 20 points per week, but Carl's is 75. If in a given week you spend less than that, your SQ level declines.

That means Bob's available self-improvement budget is 60 points, while Carl's is 5. That means Carl will never be able to improve his SQ at the rate Bob can. He can at best devote 5 points to it per week, which isn't much. Or he can dip into his 20 point reserve and lower his SQ in the hopes that it will let him reduce his maintenance cost in the future, which sometimes works and sometimes doesn't; and some investments aren't micro-meterable but only available in blocks of 10, and thus out of his reach. Or he can say "screw it, 5 hours isn't enough to do much with, I'm adding it to my rest time", which isn't a huge SQ improvement but is quite possibly the wisest investment, even if it doesn't mean a possible future reduction in his maintenance cost.

It has nothing to do with "recognizing the value of improving themselves." That is, sorry to say, the standard line out of elitist racists. (Note: I am not claiming you are an elitist racist; I am saying the argument you are using is quite popular with elitist racists trying to blame "the failings of those people" for why they're not better off.)

So yes, preexisting maintenance cost vary super widely, often for reasons that are not "fair" by any reasonable metric. ("It wasn't technically illegal at the time" is not a reasoanble metric.) And for some people, that maintenance cost is over 80 points per week and that puts them into a permanent downward spiral.

For Carl's SQ level to rise, he needs a reduction in his maintenance cost. He does not have the point budget to be able to do that on his own, however. It's not a desire that's missing, it's capacity.

That's where, I argue, Bob does have a social responsibility to spend at least some of his available 60 points on compensating for and removing the factors that keep Carl's maintenance costs high. If Bob can help reduce Carl's maintenance costs from 75 to, say, 60, that means Carl now has 20 spare points of capacity. Is that enough to be worth further investing in increasing SQ or reducing maintenance cost? Quite possibly. Maybe he will, maybe he won't, but at least now the option is there when it wasn't before.

You can call that victim blaming if you want, but that mindset is what has broken every first generation rich person out of a state of having nothing to having much.

The relatively rare exceptions are notable precisely because they are rare. The myth of the self-made man is just that: A myth. Such people almost always have other maintenance assistance: family, friends, luck, a patron, an ethnic social network that tries to identify and springboard promising individuals, etc. Even if the rare example doesn't, the general case described above is still true.

And at this point I should probably turn this into my own post, because the points analogy above is a pretty good one... :-)