I'd like to get together some people to build a couple of sheet rock shacks with wooden beam support in a patch of woods somewhere, probably in the vicinity of the Adirondacks or in Ontario or British Columbia. I have seen fifty acre parcels on sale around there for like sixty thousand dollars. Add to this about $10000 for gypsum, tools, nails, matches, a kiln, medical equipment and stuff. As for I would expect an annual property tax of about six hundred dollars for the land, and an additional six hundred dollars per year for our improvements to the land, at most, for how much can a shack or two be worth? Add to this a dollar a day per person to buy flour and animal feed, so if there are ten people then that is $3650 per year. Initially we’ll have to buy more than just flour so figure, actually, on three dollars a day per person for this figure, or $10950 per year. So say we get that $60000 plot. Total costs would be around $70000 initial investment, and around $12150 per year afterward, which will reduce over time to around $4850 per year. If there are ten people then that’s $7000 per person initial investment, and $1215 per person per year afterward, diminishing over time to $485 per person per year. The average over sixty years of living at this place might be $700, and the total figure required to live at this place for sixty years would then be $49000. Now there aren’t that many people who will ever have $49000 lying around at any point in their lives. There certainly aren’t many college-dropout retail workers who will ever have it. But all it takes to save it is a steady job, a room in a decent shared house, the self-control to make no children, the personal injury protection option on their car insurance, and, given that personal injury protection, the guts to live without health insurance. Well, one could either do that, or finish college and get a real job. I’ll take the former option.

Oh yeah, what about health insurance anyway? Isn’t it really expensive if you’re not employed and just chilling out in the woods? Well it is, and that is a good reason to have this settlement in Canada. Property taxes are not much different there than in the US. I have an inkling that the land will be easier to get in the US, though, because people here sell land all the time to pay their medical bills! But to settle in the US would require us to be our own doctors.

What fun stuff can happen in this settlement? We can sit around and make music, install windmills and solar panels, develop three-dimensional video games, learn how to practice medicine and fix automobiles…. And limit our rate of reproduction, to live easier and to set an example for the rest of the world, for this limitation is the only directed effort that yet needs to be made in this golden Age.