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How can you blame them? They’ve had heavy indoctrination, so many of them don’t know what capitalism really is.

There’s another factor, though. Since what we have now is a heavily managed system somewhere between crony capitalism and crony/special interest socialism, many of the younger people are having trouble getting on the carousel.

In my own family, I have a highly skilled individual who is ABD (all but dissertation) in physical chemistry and a pretty sharp computer guy. He had a job for two years programming at an oil exploration company whose work force was almost completely composed of H1-B workers. The price of oil finished off that job, and he’s having difficulty finding another.

He convinced me that the H1-B problem is large and real. He said that in the STEM businesses, H1B workers are like indentured servants. They don’t have a green card, and have to maintain employment for something like four years to qualify for one. If they lose their job, they are sent home.

Companies that employ them know this, and often drive them mercilessly with 70 hour workweeks, including routine weekend emergencies. Yes, it becomes a job Americans don’t like, because it’s sweatshop intellectual work. Moreover, in some of these groups, the majority of workers are Chinese or Indian, so often (not always, of course) the boss has preferences when it comes to assignments and especially promotion.

There’s been reams written about US “hollowing out” by the sending of production off-shore. Almost nothing is written about the intellectual hollowing out that will ensue due to H1B overuse. The word is starting to get around, and eventually STEM will be avoided.

Now, I’ve drifted a bit from my initial statement. My fella is pretty capitalist, but he feels like the deck is stacked against him and it’s hard to get a leg up. If his school indoctrination had taken better hold and he couldn’t analyze the problem, I could see how he might think that if this was capitalism, something else might work better.