> Western societies are really great at consuming unconstrained amount of taxes without efficiently generating returns.

Your personal observation, scientific fact or last nights night club small talk?

Seems like every week there's a "why does the west have to drop a billion bucks over a decade on X when Asia can do it for a cool ten mil in a year?" article on the front page of HN. This is pretty well researched and written about stuff, at least on the govenrment and public works side of things.