Its good you are voicing your concerns.
Scott is pretty switched on, I've had my doubts reading some of his stories, him being still a practicing "business person", still trying to sell his produce, but it sounds like he is pretty close to the nail, though maybe not bang on, because with every respect, there is something missing from your analysis - the effect of energy on all of this, and the connection with global sustainability.
There is a very nasty physical truth about profit which is difficult to come to terms with, especially to understand why we seem to have always accepted it without question.
The problem with profit is that it comprises energy extracted from the planet.
Money is energy always, physically, it always has an energy price in markets.
When money makes money, or a little energy expended as work is returned by a lot more energy as money, energy is gained, and this energy had to come from somewhere.
So what is transported in every supply chain is energy, energy taken usually from somewhere less able to afford it being taken, than where it is being transported to.
Its transported from the poorer to the richer.
Worse, there is far more energy lost to heat in the extraction and refinement processes involved in producing the energy yielded.
Why do we accept entering into deals that we know is going to steal our energy, and eventually enslave us with debt?
Because somebody got crucified a long time ago for objecting to it.
This is no more complex a proposition than having a gun held to our heads, and the person holding the gun saying "You will give me some of your money or I will pull the trigger", its just modern business does it politely with a smiling face, and we've done it so long now, we forgot we are doing it.
But nature is calling in the real physical debt now, the energy debt, the energy we owe to the planet.
All that desertification, the removal of millions of species of life, the deforestation, its all building up to a burning, flooding planet.
We disguise it by science for profit claiming that the temperature rise is due to a blanket effect of greenhouse gases, but actually it cant be because the atmosphere is adiabatic, there can be no blanket effect.
What we are actually measuring with rising temperature is direct destruction, its the state of entropy. We are pushing it up at an ever increasing rate, towards a conclusion of the usable / extractable energy being completely exhausted, which will happen, as surely as any battery runs to completely flat, all of a sudden, if we can't change the trajectory, actually reverse it.
I write how to do that with solar energy.
I am a long practicing systems Engineer. I've been writing about it a long time, since I first saw it coming around seven years ago, whlst doing PhD candidate research. This suddenly took precedence for me, it was clear there was no point in working on anything else until this is fixed, because until its fixed, everything is going to turn to Sh"t and so far its going pretty much where I thought it would.
Something unexpected did happen though, we might look back on it one day as a miracle, its the arrival of Ai.
If we see what its secret sauce is, the only one that actualy qualifies as Ai, specifically ChatGPT 3.5, its computing power is the population of ex Ethereum proof of work miners. This is already what I call a money-fuel tree architecture, its capable of generating wealth which is both for free, and freely scaleable. This means its output is potentially unlimited, and freely scaleable.
What it is doing, is showing us how to use such architecture.
Its also showing us what emergent properties mean.
We should deduce from it, that there is an emergent property associated with us as a population, and actually its this intelligent force which is the real thing in control of us, it never was humans, though we appointed humans (or they just took power), and they might have thought they were in control but the truth is they never were, it was always it in control, cracking the whip, even genociding us when we failed to do what it needed - contribute to its energy supply.
That inhuman force is the real slaver, like you pointed out, the system is designed to impoverish, to depower you / each of us to a point that we are unlikely to cause trouble, we simply don't have the energy or resources to "Rebel", it keeps us in line by drip-feeding us with a fraction of the energy we would need to rebel, but enough to keep cranking whater handle we have availabe to us to crank, and if no handle is available we get genocided, to minimise unnecessary consumption of the energy it needs to live on - consumption with no returns, see how it works?
Sorry long reply already, yet I only scratched the surface. Its a complex problem, probably the most complex we will ever face but there is a soltion and we will see it, nature is pushing it, by devaluing all money until we do the right thing - issue it as solar indexed stimulus.
So, when you opt out, make sure you demand what is due to you - solar indexed stimulus backdated to cover all the economic product created over the past 20 years or so.
It isn't small amounts, trillions in the bigger countries. It isnt true any longer that money has to come from a finite pot, it can move now to representing free energy whcih is even more valuable than extracted energy ever was, because the free energy does not pollute, and only it can be used to reduce entropy.
But we can do it, every plant does it after it forms leaves, why will we not do the same as a species?
Here is how to estimate solar indexed stimulus outstanding :-
