I think we are getting screwed everywhere. We (as a country) fell into a hole when we based our culture on consumption. Service is not an industry, and thus we have no consumption, no demand for service, and we suffer. We will have to return to an era when craft and labor was the things that drove the economy. People knew how to produce things and labor was a vital part of the equation.

Do we have a memory? I think not, the average person today is A.D.D. thus has a short term memory problem.