You grew up here. Your family helped build this place. Then you grind—60, 70, 80 hours every week. Weekends gone. Holidays gone. Decades of it. Fifty-five years straight, fingers worn down to nothing. And half your paycheck? It goes right to Uncle Sam. But here's the kicker: that money doesn't come back to you. It gets funneled somewhere else—projects, bureaucracy, systems that don't serve the people who actually paid for them. You sacrificed your entire adult life for this social contract. You followed the rules. You worked harder than most. Yet the government takes half and redistributes it to... what exactly? This is why many are questioning whether traditional financial systems truly reward productive effort or just extract value from it.