The American dream only makes sense if you’re sleeping.

 

 

 Chances are you, the reader, are cut from my own ilk. A proletariat who works for their survival. And you’ve been fed the myth that if you work hard you will succeed, but in truth, you don’t get paid for your work. You are most likely paid for your time or maybe even a fixed amount and therefore your boss is incentivized to work you as hard as possible to no benefit of your own.

Let me dispel that myth more in-depth.

 

 A 20-something is looking for work, they send out 10 applications to their most desired occupations. They get 3 interviews but are never called back. So they send out 10 more and finally land their 17th choice. However, the job only pays minimum wage with no benefits. What’s our 20-something to do? Decline the offer and continue searching while they go hungry? It’s not even a choice.

 After years of pinching pennies, constant over time, and living the most menial life imaginable, they finally manage to save up several thousand dollars. They want to start their own business and after countless unpaid hours of planning and networking, they finally open the doors to their capitalist paradise. We’ll even ignore that 90% failure rate.

 But what’s that? A new Walmart has sprouted up across the street. It undercuts their prices, operating at a loss until they are forced to close shop. But they had to mortgage their building, contract their supply, and are left tens of thousands of dollars in the hole with no more income. So they declare bankruptcy.

 And finally, we’re left with a 30-something who worked hard their entire life and has nothing to show for it. Feeling too beaten down to start the process all over again, they decide to end it all with a 12 gauge shotgun pointed at their cranium. Another victim of capitalism.

 

 

 How about a fresh high school grad? A genius in their own right, they know very well not to fall into the trap of unskilled labor. They decide to go to college and pursue their dream to become a doctor.

 Poor, they are forced to take out numerous loans over nearly a decade of education. When finally they get the privilege of adding M.D. to the end of their name, they are helped to find a job.

 But they spend another decade enslaved by debt and don’t even see a meaningful difference between their financial situation and that of a friend, a factory worker, but they have to work so much harder for it.

 Finally, at nearly 40 years our graduate friend can live their best life. Until a patient accuses them of malpractice, is successful, and they lose their career.

Oh how easy it is for all that hard work to slip away from us and amount to nothing.

Speaking of which, let us consider that friend of the doctor, the factory worker. Who went above and beyond production goals to secure every promotion and raise they could, only to wake up one day to the factory closed down without severance, or to have their job replaced by a machine.

 

The hardest working person in the world lives in poverty. Hard work seldom translates to wealth. Only exploitation of labor.

 

The biggest source of theft in this country is wage theft. You can forget larceny and grand theft auto, the purse snatchers and the muggers, that’s nothing.

Through cutting benefits or even skirting around them altogether, lean staffing and skeleton crews, failure to pay overtime or even pay you at all, and making you perform off-the-clock work, our bosses steal billions more than any amount of bank robberies ever could.

 

The authoritarian measures that you are subjugated to for almost half of your waking life that which the quality of the other half, or rather your very survival is dependent upon, isn’t freedom. After all, How can you enjoy your day off when it is only then you realize that the time it occupies and the recuperation it demands is only another mandate from your boss.

 

 

 

If low-wage workers do not always behave in an economically rational way, that is, as free agents within a capitalist democracy, it is because they dwell in a place that is neither free nor any way democratic. When you enter the low-wage workplace—and many of the medium-wage workplaces as well—you check your civil liberties at the door, leave America and all it supposedly stands for behind, and learn to zip your lips for the duration of the shift. The consequences of this routine surrender go beyond the issues of wages and poverty. We can hardly pride ourselves on being the world's preeminent democracy, after all, if large numbers of our citizens spend half their waking hours in what amounts, in plain terms, to a dictatorship.