Good luck being dangerous.

But there is more to it than that. You shouldn't let society off the hook, here. The problem with a society where credit grows on trees is that it pushes the price up on everything. Why does that tiny house on the corner cost $700k? Because if you offer $350k in cash you will be outbid by the unemployed guy down the block whose bank is willing to loan him $700k.

If you won't take those loans... perhaps you don't get to own a house. That's okay with me, but I'm relatively well paid and can afford some fairly well-located rental housing. A less well-paid person like a schoolteacher or a librarian might have to choose a two or three-hour commute, or leave the city of their birth altogether, unless they're willing to become debtors like the rest of their peers.

Think about college. Does your determination to avoid debt extend to college? Is your desire to attend MIT evidence of your "sense of entitlement"? When you're interviewing with the Ph.D.s at Google and you show them your degree from the DeVry Institute, do you think they're going to congratulate you on your good financial sense? Um, no. But to attend MIT you're going to have to compete with the people who are willing to go into debt -- and, because the easy credit of the last decade has encouraged colleges to raise tuition through the roof, you will need lots of debt of your own, or a very big pile of cash. Colleges wouldn't be so expensive if credit weren't so easy to get.

Being financially prudent is smart, but it's hard to do it on your own when society is swimming in the other direction.

Don't pass this off on society, it's an issue of choice. You choose to buy a house you can't afford, or a car. The only person to blame for your debts is yourself.

As compared to the situation today, where Google's patents allow them to be completely open about how their systems work, and we all get to read the source code to Microsoft's software because it's protected by patent?

Companies already keep their nontrivial inventions as secret as they can, because they know that the patent system is useless for its (supposed) intended purpose. [1] The system moves at a glacial pace relative to the industry, it costs too much to use, its results are unpredictable to the point of randomness, it's filled with reams and reams of invalid chaff, and frankly software itself is too abstract, mutable, and easily copied to be reliably protected by patent. There's a good reason why the inventors of patents didn't let people patent written works. Those folks weren't dummies.

No, software patents are a tool for trolls, nothing more. Every invalidated software patent is a victory for mankind.

[1] If, OTOH, you believe that the intended purpose of software patents was to allow deep-pocketed corporations to patent-troll their smaller competitors to death... the system is working precisely as designed.