Pure Philosophy: Nuture or Nature: Are we locked into one station in life?

On the face of it, especially to conservative thought, this question is so ridiculous as to have no meaning.  The United States of America was founded on the principle that you can make of your life whatever you want, given the effort and ability.  Not for us, those silly notions of "the Nobility" or the "Aristocracy."  We don't subscribe to the ideas of Castes or Classes.

And yet.

Our normal rhetoric embraces some of these concepts.  What is "The Rich" other than an epithet for "High Born?"  What is "poor" other than a euphemism for "low class?"  Oh, certainly those terms have their own meanings.  We just rarely use their actual meanings. 

The problem here is an old one.  We can trace it back to the days before our Great Republic, if not even further.  Perhaps at its height in the Middle Ages, the idea of being born "high" or "low" was hardly new even then.  The Founding Fathers rejected this notion, and believed that everyone was "Created Equal."  That is, that personal wealth was not the same as personal worth.  There were still those, however, who believed that people were "born to a station."  That someone born to the Nobility was, simply by birth, of more worth than someone born to a common family.

This is an important distinction which exists even today.

Though they won't admit it, Liberals believe (or, at least, much if their philosophy is based upon the idea) that a person born into certain circumstances is locked there for life.  At the least, they won't be able to "move up in life" without assistance and/or extreme measures.  Thus the idea that the poor go into the army to escape their poverty.  It is this belief that leads them to the idea that Government must "do something" about poverty.  Since those "low born waifs" have no prospects of advancement on their own, the Aristocracy must (noblesse oblige) assist (read: subsidize) them.

Conservatives, however, believe that a person is what a person does.  We believe that your birth station does not limit your options, in itself.  We believe that a struggling college kid, selling custom built computers out of his car, can become a CEO of a leading computer company.  We believe in upward mobility.  We believe that the Aristocracy, even granting it the highest motives, does more to harm those born to lower circumstances than it can ever do to help them.  We believe that the best way to help the poor is to enable them by getting government out of the way, and letting them find their own solutions to their poverty.