You Get What You Deserve -- Fair?

Does one have a right in America to live comfortably?

I think it would be more acceptable to say that whether one is rich or poor, one has a right to happiness and comfort if one can achieve them. It is naturally easier for richer people to achieve it than poorer, but it must be considered that there is no role in our form of government to equalize the actual achievement.

Suppose that John Doe goes to a privileged private school because his family can afford the high tuition. His family can afford it because his father is a banker and his mother is a corporate lawyer. On the other side of town, Jane Roe is born to working-class parents who barely make enough to scrape by. She cannot possibly go to the same school that John does, even if she could afford private school at all. She goes to public school, which, in her neighborhood, is not particularly good, for a number of reasons both economic and noneconomic. Suppose that John Doe graduates from his privileged schools with a "B" average, gets into Harvard, gets into law school, and becomes a young lawyer earning $150,000.00 per year as a first-year associate. Jane Roe, let's say, also got an "B" average, but because she couldn't afford a private college and didn't want to become burdened with loans, went to community college, and became a manicurist making $8.50/hour.

Now, should Jane Roe have the same right to be happy after she is graduated from her high school as John? If so, why?

I agree that both John and Jane have a reasonable expectation that society would not let them fall into a horrific state of poverty; but strictly speaking, Jane will never be as "comfortable" financially as John. She will never be able to afford to buy a new Mercedes Kompressor the way that John could right out of law school, nor a spacious condo in a nice area of New York City. Does she have a right to be as financially comfortable?

Is there a way for a leftist to answer this question without resorting to traditional canards of racism and classism?

The bottom line, I think, is what is "fair".

"Fairness" is like air -- everyone knows it's around, but no one can really see it. Likewise, people can see the effects of unfairness, but relatively few people can actually define unfairness itself in the abstract. That's always been a major problem, I think, in our political process. What, exactly, is "fair"? I agree that in a just or fair society, the least of our citizens should not have to suffer grinding poverty, but how can the vast majority of people reliably be persuaded of this fact through an intellectually rigorous argument based on fairness?

The importance in being able to do this lies in the fact that the argument might be used to support objectives far more difficult to justify by other means than commonly supported ones.

I hope that we can all work together toward such a definition