> Western society is hopelessly locked into and dependent on manufacturing scarcity, and the idea that people have to pay for things.
How do you reconcile that with the fact that Western society has invented, improved, and supplied many of the things we lament that other countries don't have (and those countries also lament it - it's not just our own Stockholm Syndrome).
Most of what gets invented either 1. relies on its scarcity to extract value or 2. if it's not naturally scarce, it gets locked behind patents, copyrights, cartels, regulations, and license agreements between corporations, in order to keep the means of its production out of the hands of common people. Without that scarcity and ability to profit from it, it wouldn't be invented.
