You work your ass off all your life for a dingy little apartment in a drab and depressing concrete ant hill. No matter how much you put into your job, you can't move up till someone at the top dies, and even if you got to move up, you still had to stand in line all day for toilet paper and a spud or two on holidays. When you were too old to work, you were sent to the collective to twaddle around until you croaked and made room for the next stiff.
The only way to really get something out of life was to become an inner party member, but to do that, you had to be the childhood blood brother of an inner party member, which meant that one in a million or two was going to go that route.
American capitalism, it seems, is not far from the now collapsed socialist system. The primary difference is that the inner party members carry titles such as CEO, CFO, COO, etc., rather than something more drab and functional.
Suppose you work your tail off and the best you can do is a bland, gray concrete box on the 14th floor of a bland, gray concrete box that looks like dozens of other bland, gray concrete boxes? Suppose all your labor and effort means that you still can't afford to fill the pantry or your family's bellies, and you still have to stand in line to get your basic necessities?
Now suppose that welfare checks and food stamps offer you as good or even slightly better? Where's the incentive to work? If you can never get ahead, never improve your lot, and not working is pretty much the same lifestyle as working, then why roll out of bed in the morning?
Yup, better to just sit and stare at the TeeVee and sign the registry once a month down at the welfare/employment office, than to buy a work wardrobe, pay for transportation, maintain a bank account (all fees included) and pay rent on a drab, gray concrete box that looks exactly like the neighbor's who's getting his for free from Uncle Sugar.
Why have an idea that no one will act on? Why put up with daily dressing-downs from the boss (whose drab, gray box is slightly larger than yours)? Why go through the hassle of doing anything more than just breathing when it makes absolutely no difference at all?
The USSA is riding the coat tails of the USSR. Folks are giving up. There's no point to the rat race if no one wins - except the inner party members to whom you are most certainly not related.
America today is little different from the London of the Industrial Revolution. Work is hardy more than indentured servitude, slaving away 12 hours a day for nothing at the end of a lifetime of drudgery. It will most certainly hit that point in the near future when all retirement accounts are swept clean to pay off the gambling debts of the inner party members.
True capitalism means that the harder you work, or the better your ideas, the higher you social status and quality of living.
My great uncle Pat was from a family of Welsh coal miners who relocated to Butte, Montana. By luck and good looks, he got a job as a house servant instead of in the mines, where his brothers worked. The brothers died of black lung...to a man. Pat was able to save his two coins of pay per month by eating scraps from the master's table. Eventually, he got out and was able to build a good life in California, where his family eventually became quite successful.
Chances of that happening at Wal-Mart are slim to none. So why get up in the morning? Welfare and food stamps are free, require no effort and the lifestyle is the same.
Besides, what an insult it must be to work in a store full of products you'll never be able to buy...