Would you work for a company whose main source of revenue was government money? Say in public transportation, for example?
Would you want that on your conscience?
What about the fact that you’re working for a company where all the money is stolen? That the “profit” of the company is served by lobbying for the continuation and growth of this criminal enterprise? That by working there you are making them “successful”?
What about the propaganda that you are directly or indirectly supporting, pushing environmentalism, wealth redistribution, communism, etc, as what’s morally righteous?
Do you think that’s okay? Including spreading moralizing propaganda for its continued expansion?
What if your company is directly taking part in both lobbying the government and propaganda to the public?
Is this not basically an anti-capitalist organization? If they are deliberately, strategically selling environmentalism and government funded transportation to the public as morally righteous, with lobbying and other sorts of natural activities a company like this would engage in, in order to perpetuate and grow this whole enterprise?
So where’s the line? Are there no moral boundaries whatsoever?
Right and wrong, in this sense, are derived from the context of what an individual knows. Is a locomotive engineer working for Amtrak immoral because he has a job that provides him with income, or perhaps because he doesn’t use his mind to view the world from a perspective of Objectivism?
I think you’re morally justified in taking a government-funded job if that’s the only option. (Though of course that wouldn’t be a problem in a free market.) However, you do have an obligation to switch jobs as soon as it is feasible to do so.
Would the job you do reasonably exist in a totally free economy? Part of the problem is that government has become THE MONOPOLY in replacement of what people called monopolies in history. You want to teach, build roads, explore space - it’s hard to do so without connection to government. But that’s different then if you work for the IRS, EPA, HUD, etc. The standard Objectivist view is that it’s morally OK to pursue your values in any productive effort that would exist in a free world even if it funded by force thru government. But, if your chosen developed skill is management (as an example), you should not exercise your skills in an agency like the IRS that would not exist in a legitimate government. Go work for the defense department.