Steve Hofmeyr, Cape Town: Patrick Rampai's letter "No equal opportunity in SA" (August 3), refers.

Such reckless naïveté is deserving of fools.

The only sane outcome of an open society is rich and poor people. The only way around this is teaching Africa that it still deserves what it did not earn. If keeping what you earn is what a fair capitalist society is, ours is well doomed.

Poverty will prevail for as long as we keep in power a government defined by nepotism, media and judiciary containment, golden handshakes, silent diplomacy, BEE charters, quotas, unprecedented unemployment, unethical grants, land grabs and tenderpreneurs.

Your prospects for your mother is a sad giveaway of your unrealistic expectations.

The Afrikaner's sense of entitlement rests on the amount of lives they sacrificed for their place in the sun, and how they looked at resources around them from the ashes of post-war ruin.

One man's ability should never be a threat to another. This is what an open society is, sir. As Ayn Rand once said of Robin Hood: "He is held to be the first man who assumed a halo of virtue by practising a charity with wealth which he did not own, by giving away goods he had not produced, by making others pay for the luxury of his pity.

"He is the man that became the symbol of the idea that need, not achievement, is the source of rights, that we don't have to produce - only to want - that the earned does not belong to us, but the unearned does." (from Atlas Shrugged, 1957).

The colonised individual is an envious individual, isn't he?

Your merry Marxist ideals have been tried thoroughly and found untrue and somewhat devastating.

Now debunk me without reverting to the hackneyed "racist" polemic.