It riles me up that we put up with the system we've created. I don't have the means to pull the ripcord, but I'm determined to isolate myself from it as much as I can. For me, the desire to work for the government is a silent form of protest against the system in more ways than one. I simply do not care, have never cared about any bosses bottom line, so I'm looking forward to never having to deal with revenue targets ever again. Serving the public explicitly aligns much better with my values. I feel like the only way out of this mess is with a locked-down, ham-strung form of capitalism that is under tight control by strong and capable governments. (Someone needs to prevent the babies from dying, and it's not gonna be the hustlers.) And while it's surely naive of me to say this, I hope to be a small part of that solution.
I've been mulling this over a lot lately. I think the biggest issue the western world faces is the decision by American conservatives to equate socialism with communism and put capitalism and socialism as two systems, rather than two directions. It seems to me that every successful society since the Sumerians has been some balance of socialism and capitalism. We miss this because Europe had about 1400 years of barbarism and feudalism, but the highest achievements during the age of faith were towards socialism, capitalism or both. And it seems to me that there's no perfect balance; a successful society has the ability to bounce back and forth. Yet the Republicans took one look at The New Deal and went "we must tear it down" while also taking one look at post-war Europe and going "we must socialize the shit out of it." I think there are times for hustle and there are times for safety nets and those times can absolutely overlap. Our biggest mistake was pointing at the Soviet Union and going "that's socialism!" rather than pointing at the Soviet Union and going "that's a kleptocracy." Kind of like how we pointed to the Twin Towers and went "that's an act of war" rather than "that's a crime." Fuckin' ideology, man. I'm not into it.
Reading Ha-Joon Chang was what sold me on the idea that capitalism is created and something we should only allow in a carefully controlled environment, not something to let run free. Let socialism build the bedrock of existance, of a good life, of opportunity. Only once there's a solid enough basis for everyone can you let capitalism run the rest of whatever people want to undertake. Fundamentally both socialism and capitalism are things we must build and maintain. As a species I think we're good at the first but are terrible at the second part. Since capitalism is the aggressive one, usually it steadily increases its territory until groups of people or governments snap and go "enough's enough" and reign it in. My worry is that we've lost the ability to seriously slam our fist on the table to reign in capitalism since the eighties due to some combination of the paycheck-to-paycheck middle class, decreasing unions and bowling alone. But I'll freely admit that that's a gut feeling that I can't properly back up.