are poor people really just lazy people?

     It has occurred to me that people have the wrong idea about why some people are poor and others are rich. Many of the people i have come into contact with have the notion that poor people somehow choose to be poor or are just too lazy to get themselves out of the mire. How can that be true when the thing that gives us as human beings the most joy in life is work. Not to say that all of us want to slave all day on a construction site in the hot sun or pass out from heat exhaustion while underground mining for coal but work nonetheless. The work of our choice often doesn't seem to feel like work at all because we enjoy it. We get a sense of accomplishment when we are given the opportunity to drive ourselves and pour our hearts into our passions. This could be a great music composer spending countless hours on his masterpiece, or a doctor scouring over medical journals to come up with a cure or even a chef traveling the world to gather the best ingredients for his greatest dish. People love work and they love the feeling of a job well done so to think that some people; particularly the poor, just have no drive to do anything just seems completely perverse.
     Given the opportunity to work and support themselves and their families the poor are no less inclined the work hard than the rich, they are just people. In fact many poor people are forced to work more than one full time job just in-order to be at a living wage. If that does not show a willingness to work hard what does? The fact that a person does not have the drive to be successful in the traditional sense of the term does not mean that the are completely devoid of drive. It may just mean that this person is more willing to do a more labor intensive job that they are willing to do one that is more mentally intensive. Why does this mean that their efforts are worth so much less than the work of someone who chooses the standard route. This is not to say that a person should be rewarded according to the level of contribution that they make to society because they certainly should. A person who has spent years in law school to learn and master his craft should certain be rewarded handsomely for the the time he dedicated and the effort expendid. However that does not mean that a person who instead of going to college after high school, chose to become a security guard and start a family should not be able to live relatively comfortably and be afforded a measure of dignity.
     If by some unimaginable circumstance you were given the ability to create an economic system for a society in which you would be blindly place at either the top of the food chain meaning the very rich, the bottom of the food chain meaning the very poor or at some point in the middle; what kind of system would you create? Keeping in mind that you do not know where in the system you would end up, wouldn't you want a system that is as fair as possible? Would you want a system such that if in the worse case senario if you end up poor you would still have the means to get by and to live a modest life? There is the possibility that you could end up at the top of the food chain but their really is no guarantee so it would certainly be in your best interest to make sure that you don't create a system where you can end up massively wealthy but there is also a strong possibly that you can end up in-humanly poor. Now consider if you were a newborn baby, what kind of world would you want to be born into?