The "choices" that people are capable of making are often made for them from birth. This sounds like an argument made from an elite position of power.
No.
They may be influenced by the circumstances they grow up in but they always have choices. Everyone has access to free public schooling. Money for college is so free flowing you'd be hard pressed to find someone not able to get loans and grants to attend. The biggest difference is that it's usually easier for people with money than those without. Some might have to work their way through college while others don't but that's life, nobody said it was easy.
I've lived on both sides of the fence. I grew up with whatever I wanted and then went through times I worked two full time jobs to support a wife and kids while squeezing in college full time and eating Ramen noodles. I paid for school with loans and grants and still had to do odd jobs in whatever free time I had to make ends meet. I missed a lot of stuff when my kids were little because I had to work. It wasn't fun or easy but it was necessary.
Sure there are some people that for whatever reason, physical, mental or situational, that isn't a possibility but those people are in the very small minority. Most just aren't willing to put in the years of hard work that it takes to be successful. On my 21st birthday, which also happened to be Thanksgiving night, I wasn't out partying and having fun with my friends or at home relaxing with my family, I was pulling a 7pm-7am shift, not because I wanted to but because I made the decision to better my situation and that made it necessary.
I could have taken the easy path. Accepted government assistance, my wife and I have 5 kids so it probably would have been substantial, I could have taken money from the Cherokee nation to help pay for my college, money that I wouldn't have to repay, I could have just worked one job making $6.50/hr (which is what I started at) and sat at home on my days off complaining about how broke I was and how unfair life is. However I'm hard headed and not afraid of working long, hard hours if that's what it takes to get the job done and paying my own way along the way.
The biggest problem is that people just don't have the work ethic it takes to become successful, they think they should be rewarded for just doing the bare minimum. Put in the minimum amount of time required, do whatever they want the rest of the time, but still be paid enough to afford them the life of the upper middle class.
Fast forward to today.... I make more than enough from just one job with the company I've worked with for 21 years (the same one that used to pay me $6.50/hr) to live comfortably. Yet here it is, 4:00 Thanksgiving afternoon, and I'm at work when I could be at home because they pay me a ridiculous amount of money to be here today and tomorrow so I take it. I still work on other stuff on my days off and make more money doing those things than I do working here. I have a friend that owns an accounting firm that makes tons of money and he's often still at work at 10pm at night. I'm friends with a multi-billionaire who owns a major sporting franchise. He's 70 something and he gets up and starts his work day at 4am every day and it often doesn't end until midnight.
The fact is, most people who make a lot of money work for it and put in more hours than people realize. They see them in their nice houses or driving fancy cars and think that they just have it made but don't understand the amount of work that goes into paying for those things so they think that everybody should be able to afford them. What I've found is the main commonality of wealthy people is their work ethic. Not all of them an geniuses or even super smart but they work very hard at what they do and they don't just become successful, they make themselves successful. That work ethic is also what is missing in the majority of the population and why about half the country doesn't make enough money to even pay taxes. I was once part of that majority but I worked myself out of it.
Life is full of choices. The problem is that most people only like to make the easy ones.