I am effectively a social libertarian in the ways I think about politics, but I also think we are rapidly approaching a breaking point in history where we have a two fold break in society that will necessitate a change of economics and political thinking. I discuss this in my optimist series of human potential, but in a condensed and abridged form, I believe we will elimate scarcity of the requirements of human live, and by doing so we will enter a post scarcity world where no one is needed to produce or persist human livelihood, and everyone can dedicate themselves to creative endevors and their own interests. Once we have robotic farming and mining, and fully automated construction of homes, utilities, and goods, we eliminate human "labor" in the traditional sense, because no one is needed to create the things we want or need to live. In our current system, the owners of these means of production would drain every other person in the world try and destitute and will become the most wealthy superclass of people ever known. That would be an absolute revolutionary breaking point anyway, so however you slice the pie, things change big time.
The point is that everyone will be 3d printing whatever food they want from carbon mined by automated machines powered by power extracted completely automatically built with metals mined automatically and assembled automatically. There is a sizable gap between maintaining the status quo and exponential improvement in a post singularity situation, so I imagine there would be a gap (and almost certainly in this century) where these machines just maintain everything perpetually. Of course eventually the singularity hits and everything hits the fan as human beings become irrelevent, but the issues of this circumstance hit long before then.
When all your food is provided without any human capital involved, everyone could stop working. They could persue their dreams and passions with no fear for housing or livelihood to the next day. Of course, traditional models of ownership of land and goods strongly impedes this - the owners of these automated systems would want reparations for their use, even if it costs them nothing to maintain the systems, because they started the process. Obviously, that is completely unsustainable and it is already showing today with digital goods that are make once, sell forever, and never become involved in with human capital again that break traditional economic systems and cause strife even in the modern economy.
But it gets worse in this system - land becomes scarce and precious, because it is hard to create new land even with everything automated - automated starship construction and builting will still be time consuming and engineering such systems will be insurmountably up-front expensive. And that gets to an even deeper root of this problem, because the up-front costs are huge. It is why our modern economy skirts these possibilities and ignores them, because they present systems that we can't deal with. The modern manufacturing and software industries are draining the wealth from the vast majority of people with engineer once earn money in perpetuity systems around the world today, which (I think) is the main driver of economic distress everywhere right now. The ipads and other electronics manufactured by robots and designed once but paid into forever bankrupt the average person while the profit margins of such businesses prove massive. It is because there is an inequality in the valuation to the human capital of labor - with complete automation, with the removal of people from the equation of economics, you break the system because when people can profit without input you simply drain money from one source to another with no way to stop it. You funnel money in a unidirectional tunnel that ends up with a tiny super-wealthy body of the owners of the means of automated production and a destitute mass of everyone else who has no stake in the systems and thus can't even exchange with the owners of these automated systems for the resources they produce.
This has a substancial impact on everything, but here I am ranting about politics. So what happens? In the short term, this small subset of people who own these automated means of production can exert unlimited influence on politicians to enact whatever laws they want, for reasons I will describe in detail in another section on how the current system makes the individual citizens of America (and most countries) irrelevent, but assume the extreme is that with the funneling of all wealth and capital into the few who own the means of automated production (which no one can compete with anyway, because they create stuff for free after you build them in the first place) they get whatever they want. You might have a revolution at a critical breaking point when people can't afford these autmated means anymore - which simultaneously means the wealthy lose their validity, the politics lose their control, and the people go third world again overnight, when the current economic system breaks apart. It is happening right now, but as usual the masses are placated on their bread and circuses, so there is no revolt, just dwindling influence and prosperity. When it breaks, the system crashes top down, because suddently these automated means of production lose their purpose because nobody can afford them, or anything, anymore, so it would be a rapid transition into these resources being provided for free. It may be a violet ursurption, or maybe by eminent domain whatever remnants of government take control of the means of production to provide for free the resources they produce to the distressed citizenry, but there will be a transition where the perpetual extraction of resources from goods that cost nothing to maintain occurs, and everyone just starts getting everything for free.
You have the usual issues associated with such a system, in a way similar to modern roads and infrastructure falling apart around us since nobody wants to pay to maintain them. Whenever this automated infrastructure falls into disarray (and it will, even when it can automatically repair itself, some catastrophe will happen) you can assume that the government will act to repair it by any means necessary. The age and lack of motivation to develop these systems will probably show, and over time the quality will degrade, since unlike in the capitalist system where the business heads are motivated to constantly iterate their automated systems to make them more efficient and effective, the government could care less as long as they just work.
Regardless, you have everyone getting everything from homes to goods to food made for free. The only real industry left would be new kinds of automated production, but since everything else is post scarcity and everyone could effectively live in a mansion with everything they want (since machines can automatically produce everything) you really only worry about scarce Earth bound resources we need to mine from other planets or celestial bodies (be they meteors, moons, etc). You would expect a transition as automated means of producing things become more common for things that were still manual (you can easily see this in effect today, it is easier to automatically build cars from parts than to mine and refine the steel to make the frame, or it is easier to automate a check out line than it is to automate stocking shelves or delivering goods) but like I said, that critical breaking point is when the essentials are automated. So you eventually get everything automated, solely on the basis there are just too many smart engineers who would just implement automated systems for the production of everything else just for fun. And in reality, the limiters on such creations aren't a lack of human ingenuity - we just need people to build the robots, so we can program them, and put them to work. No one wants to make that investment because it is risky, expensive upfront, and otherwise not a very persuasive business proposition, because it is radical.
I'll make a post on that too. The ingredients of absolute automation. Anywho, derailing the point again, we are post scarcity, government controls the means of production, and then everyone is either playing their own hobbies and dreams or living off entertainment. Of course, you get a lot less entertainment because without scarcity, there is nothing an entertainer could want other than more entertainment, so everyone in it for the money (hint: most people, especially on big budget productions that take a dozen animators to make a nose) drops out, and you have a revertion to "independent" productions. Basically, individuals with passion working together to make things because it is fun, not because it feeds them. Which introduces its own problems.
I'm going to make this a two parter since I haven't even gotten to the politics of such a society, and I am still ranting about that goodness. So yeah, part 2 of part 2 inbound.
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