I thought you were right on at the top but ended up so wrong by the bottom.

Yes, to a strong extent, your employee must give you more value for his average hour's production than you on average pay him for an hour's production. The margin exists because there is risk involved in the whole process for you, as the employer. You approach business not as a gambler who approaches a Black Jack table, but as a strategic player who approaches a Black Jack table. Expectancy is the number you get when you take the vector of the odds of 'striking' (profiting) and 'missing' (losing) in a given time-slice, dotted with the vector of amount at profit and amount at risk (expenses) in a given time-slice. The first vector reflects the Roulette game table odds, the second vector reflects the Roulette payout values/ratios. Add in accounting for Risk of Ruin, and you now have the basic framework to understand why companies and firms need cash cushions, need to operate on margins which seem obscenely wide at times, etc. OK enough with this tangent.

What's happening is each generation has grown up under increasing government influence. Rules and penalties seem to keep increasing as time goes on, with marginal relief occasionally (cannabis being the most recent example). Americans seem to have grown up propagandized and cowed. It isn't so much directly an effect of having it so good post-WWII, but that the appearance of 'progress' put less and less pressure on parents in raising their children to be independent and capable rather than fragile/brittle highly specialized and dependent social modules. It isn't that great times directly harmed us, but that it permitted dysgenic memetics and policies to grow and flourish within our society to the point now that it's reducing performance.

You have to understand that Communism was never real competition. The same super-rich the average street-Marxist rails against (Redshield family, et al) were heavily involved in the establishment and support of the USSR. So much of modern American society reflects the stern words of Yuri Bezmenov, ex-KGB agent and defector to the US in the late 20th Century, in his interview by G.E. Griffin. He died of a heart attack a few years after, a cause of death which is unlikely to elicit deep investigation but can be done with certain rare poison agents suspended in a thin 'ice bullet' as the vehicle. That was then, and modern tech today allows for sonic and electromagnetic systems which use interference waves to get through objects the beat-wave ordinarily would be blocked by but the carriers aren't. See recent US embassy in Cuba kerfuffle for evidence that I'm not just some happy tin foil merchant. If Russia is at all involved in the culture war within the US, they are much more likely helping/funding hippy, gender-queer, and other Leftist causes as they tend to be the most de-stabilizing forces in cohesive societies. KGB always took good care of that element of the target population once their usefulness was expended.

What killed the American gold goose was democracy and propaganda. Things went down hill after Television was introduced and became ubiquitous in the household. Never before could a State propaganda arm be able to beam their messages directly to the living rooms and dinner tables of America in such a manner. Because communication is only 10% verbal, so much programmatic content can and will get by the viewer's critical observer process due to a combination of factors: the refresh rate inducing a mild dream-like state of hypnosis and suspended disbelief (though likely less an issue with modern screens), and the subconscious' tendency to take sensory input at face value as if it were true, and subtly integrate it into memories, habit, and operational procedure.

Ever experience the feeling of disliking something everybody else you know seems to dislike, even though you know little to nothing about it (which has nothing to do with culture/race, as uncanny valley may explain that)? That is the effect of the social elements in your brain picking up on memetic information which would, if absorbed and presented, increase your inclusion into the social group. Because it is more comfortable to be included than excluded, the mind will tend to pick that path by default unless the critical observer element of the mind halts the process and redirects. This is why it's imperative to suspend the viewer's disbelief and get the viewer to be in a mentally lulled state before presenting strategic ideas in an associative manner. The mind's memory system is an associative system, and if something is associated with negative connotation in a social sense enough times then the brain will feed back the negative feeling upon thinking that something in the future. The brain, as said, remembers things in an associative manner and it takes its sensory input for granted, so under suspended disbelief the brain will 'record' (in a loose sense) all the situational elements as truthful reality. When disbelief is not suspended, the critical observer is able to evaluate statements and modify the brain's response to it. This is related to Göbbel's quote, which went something like "Tell a lie big enough or often enough, and it eventually becomes fact." The work of men like B.F. Skinner and Edward Bernays would be impossible if humans were all special little individual snowflakes who have souls and who are completely dissimilar.