Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

This comic, titled "Scarcity," is a long-form text piece (a format Weinersmith occasionally uses) depicting a conversation between a fat man and a woman about economics. The man explains that economics was originally the study of allocating scarce resources, tracing it back through increasingly absurd historical origins. He then argues that in the modern world, true scarcity has been eliminated -- resource scarcity can be created artificially in virtual goods, so nothing is truly scarce anymore. He reveals a beautiful, perfect apple in a velvet box, but then reveals the catch: the apple's pine box releases a pine-eating beetle that will destroy every Canadian pine. The woman is horrified, and the man cheerfully explains that this is the new economics -- "mainly just introducing ugly things into people's lives and then offering to take them away."

The comic is a sharp satire of artificial scarcity and modern economic practices. The man's argument builds from legitimate economic theory (scarcity as the foundation of economics) to an absurd but pointed conclusion: when natural scarcity disappears, companies and economic actors create artificial scarcity or artificial problems to maintain the economic framework. The apple-and-beetle scenario is a metaphor for business models that introduce problems (malware, planned obsolescence, paywalls, etc.) and then charge people to remove them. The humor comes from the escalating absurdity of the presentation and the dark accuracy of its central insight about how certain modern economic practices amount to creating problems in order to sell solutions.