There have been numerous criticisms of the Occupy Wall Street movement that attack them for not “working hard enough.”This “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” argument has been the justification for the atrocities of capitalism since the gilded age. I disagree with this argument for three reasons.
1) I don't really think that that it is true. There is no level playing field. Education costs money. People in the upper levels of society connect with the others in the upper levels thus ensuring that they remain in power.
2) We can trade statistics and anecdotal evidence about whether someone can pull themselves up by their bootstraps forever. However, what is more important is what your argument justifies. The view that someone isn't rich because they are "imperfectly evolved" lacking in cognitive ability or inherently "lazy" is EXTREMELY dehumanizing. It is this very logic that has justified every genocide in history. Indigenous populations were justifiably exterminated because they were "cognitively incapable" of advancing the "wonders of western society". The fact that they looked and acted differently than rich white men meant they could justifiably be killed. In fact, your argument is justifying a contemporary, ongoing genocide against the poor. The rich ensure that there is no structural way that someone in poverty can support themselves. Then they blame it on the person in poverty in order to continue taking away the means by which that person lives. Millions of people die from poverty because those in power systematically dehumanize them and take away their means of survival so that they can buy another private jet.
3) Even if it is possible for those in poverty to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and even if this argument didn't justify an ongoing genocide on the poor, there are still some major problems of the nature of capitalist "success" itself. The logic of capitalist expansion destroys the environment, creates numerous resource wars, and constitutes an ongoing war on the third world. There is no question that an economic model that relies on the absorption of surplus value via consumption will inevitably destroy the environment and possibly even conditions for life on earth. The acceleration of greenhouse gas emissions via industrial production and consumer automobiles and the acceleration of global warming will at the very least cause a huge amount of the world's population to be submerged by the melting ice caps. Also, it is not coincidental that every war that we are currently engaged in is in a very resource rich region. Libya has some of the best crude oil in the world that is absolutely essential for the European capitalist nations. Iraq had substantial oil reserves while Afghanistan has one of the largest concentration of rare earth metals in the world (an essential ingredient in electronics). Lastly, the "success" of western capitalism inherently relegates the third world to the position of "natural recourse" banks for western companies. The population of the third world is an expendable after thought ground under the wheel of "successful" entrepreneurial resource extraction.
While there are numerous other problems with the "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" argument (ranging from racism to sexism to heteronormativity), these are the three arguments that I believe are the most relevant in the context of the Occupy Wall Street movement and there critique of current capitalism.