Most people agree it isn't normal. The problem is the people at the levers of power think otherwise. Capitalism as it exists in the US today, with effectively no regulation and deeply intertwined with governance, but in the wrong direction (corporations steering government) is basically the perfect exemplar of what they call a vicious circle in systems thinking. Couple that with the isolationist and individualist principles at the heart of American thinking and you have a perfect storm of runaway variable maximization (aka instability) as increasingly smaller groups of people amass increasing amounts of resources and power.

Wage labor is then the perfect structure to ensure that most resistance from the bottom is suppressed before it can even really start. When you depend on the corporation to succeed for your subsistence (since there is no adequate social safety net to fall back on) taking a principled stance and refusing to destroy great works of literature becomes a highly costly endeavor for most people.