>Oh? So before capitalism, everyone always had enough of what they wanted?
Pretty much, at least if you go back far enough. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors never envied the neighbor's new Mercedes. But they did have enough to eat and had relatively abundant leisure time.
I'm not arguing that we need to go back to that way of life - just to stress that scarcity is a state of mind, and so the notion of scarcity could become meaningless again in a different type of modern society. It is an artifact of the economic assumption that people are all rational maximizers with infinite wants.
Brett