Autonomous Nation
Tax time always brings back a recollection made in some far-away point in time that I was going to make some real money this year.  If I had a nickel for every....

When you are a systems analyst, you tend to spend all your time analyzing, and at some point your (recently ex-) spouse asks, “What did you actually do?”  Umm. . .

It occurs to me that all six billion people on planet Earth could fit in the combined area of Bexar and Comal Counties if each (person) were allocated one square meter of land.  Since people don’t live on one square meter of land, it is perhaps more relevant to point out that if all six billion people lived two to a household, and each household covered the typical area of a suburban style ranch house, this would cover an area the size of Texas and Oklahoma combined.  True Texans, of course, don’t want to hear this, but Texas is smaller than any of the following: Alaska, New South Wales (Australia), Manitoba (Canada) , or Somalia.

The amount of solar energy received in the area of a house is sufficient to power a single story house with two people in it, plus power at least limited transportation.  You couldn’t have a tree in your yard (it would block the solar panels), and your car might go only 35 miles per hour, but hey, it could get you to the airport.

In theory, the space covered by a typical back yard could be enough to produce food for one person (as long as they were principally vegetarian) so grabbing New Mexico, Arkansas and Louisiana in addition to the aforementioned states would be enough to feed, power, and house everyone on the globe in the traditional American style.

The cost of implementing all this equipment would be about $100,000 per household for solar power panels, $100,000 for the house, $25,000 for robot driven farming equipment, $5000 for water gathering and recycling equipment, and $50,000 for a battery powered car ($20,000 in batteries would have to be replaced every three years).  For less than $300,000, you and your significant other could achieve a permanent state roughly equivalent to that of most welfare recipients. . .not have to work another day in your life. Theoretically.

High tech subsistence farming would certainly crimp the style of the Feds. You would have no income, therefore there would be no income tax. “Can you take fresh ripened tomatoes?”

You would have time to get a real education. You’ll need one, most specifically a PhD in Mechanical Engineering, with some minors in Information Technology, Agriculture, and Chemistry. Otherwise, you will have to hire the expertise on a consulting basis, which means you are periodically paying high-powered talent, which means you need income, which means you have to become high-powered talent yourself, which puts you back in the max tax bracket. Sigh.

What becomes possible soon becomes necessary. Colleges are handling a flood of freshmen, since two thirds of all graduating high-school seniors are now starting college. Presumably, our young people are not aspiring to careers in dish washing, truck driving, welding, roof repair, and trenching. If we roboticize the menial work, then we can eventually bring it “indoors”, in the sense that we own the productive capacity outright, rather than buy the outputs. The only real wealth left at that point is intellectual property: the designs, know how, diagnostic routines, educational content, and other abstractions that make up a “total automation” economy.

If you hate doing chores around the house now, just wait until it’s indistinguishable from a spaceship.