Comment by galangalalgol

Probably 50s-70s? The golden age of capitalism oddly enough. Among other things taxation maintained a more even wealth distribution during this time in many western countries. Combined with a record large generation that had few children and parents that dies in wars (almost everyone working), this lead to a surplus. When there is a surplus the overlords are generous. Now that generation is old and dependent on the handful of children they had. There is no longer a surplus. There is hope that the technologies we are creating could bring enough productivity gains to return to surplus conditions, but the population decline that will have to overcome is extreme. IP laws aren't encouraging these productivity gains like we need them to, so we should ignore them. The west deciding to ignore chinese IP won't be the thing that starts the war, and it isn't like china ever respected the IP of the west. We should be buying up all the tooling we need to painfully bootstrap automated manufacturing ourselves and reverse engineer it.