Thanks for your tempered response. My pointing out of my hardship was more-or-less to show that I'm not just some inexpert at hardship while lecturing others about hardship. I've paid some dues and I think I have some insight into the supposed beneficiaries of social programs that many commentators on policy know nothing about. I wasn't under any confusion about what you were saying, but I wanted to add that economic hardship can be local, and that it may not matter to the individuals experiencing it whether the rest of the world is partaking in the same misery.

I'll just bullet my responses to your points with numbers for brevity:

1. I'm of the opinion that the Katrina situation in New Orleans is a product of the government's continual willingness to subsidize people's poor decisions. Every year I hear about some group of people who live in floodplains across the country getting stuck in floods, sometimes dying, and failing to have adequate insurance (or any other preparations for that matter) to recover from what they should have known was inevitable. Every time they get bailed out and rebuild in the exact same places. New Orleans during Katrina is no exception. Those people shouldn't have been living there in the first place. Without the repeated bailing out of those poor people by the government, they just simply wouldn't live in that place. If there's no profit to be made by rebuilding New Orleans, it's because nobody's willing to pay for it, and I see nothing wrong with that. That might sound callous and cold, but that's not where I'm coming from. I think those people probably suffered more because of their choices, and I believe that if they hadn't been bailed out at some earlier time in history (as is evidenced by the failed levy system that was built by the Army Corps of Engineers), they wouldn't have experienced such hardship. I don't wish that on anyone. I don't think we should be setting those people up for the same failure again, which we surely are in the process of doing, because New Orleans will flood again.

2. I didn't major in economics at any point, but I did take macro and micro during undergrad, along with environmental economics, and I had to repeat macro for my MBA coursework as well because the credits wouldn't transfer (among other related coursework). I think in some ways, that may make me less qualified to think critically about economics, but then again I've always been a bit of a skeptic when it comes to authority, so I'm not docking myself too much for it. As you might have guessed, I'm not much for the appeal to authority arguments.
   To your points though, those kinds of business practices are not sustainable. If you show me a monopoly that was present at one point in history, I'll find you the market forces that eventually dismantled it. That is, unless some government program intervened on said firm's behalf. The exception being natural monopolies that the government hasn't done much to curtail anyway. Regardless, I'm having trouble seeing how the formation of monopolies could refute my points about the downward price pressure of automation, and how this doesn't suddenly remove the incentive for the goods to be provided in the marketplace. I still think my point holds unless I'm missing something in your response.

3. I actually spent most of my youth in a rural area and did my share of farm work. It's actually how I put myself through college. I know how to hunt, raise animals, butcher meat, grow food, preserve food, etc. The thing about all of that though is that those rural people are not islands. They interact with each other economically speaking, and with people from urban areas, and their lives are immeasurably improved by that type of trade. It would literally be the stone age out there without economic specialization. No iron plows, no internal combustion engines, no metal of any kind for that matter. Simple stone and wood tools, probably self-made, that's it. If you took someone like me, a rural person, and plopped me in the middle of an uninhabited wilderness with just the clothes on my back, I would almost certainly die within a few weeks or months. I think I may fare a little better than most because of my background, but I think even a person from the Stone Age would face a similar fate. Ejection from the tribe was a death sentence even then. Look at that guy Survivorman. Even his repeated survival strategy is to simply get back to civilization before nature kills you. Fact is, we need each other, and we always have. I don't see it as particularly alarming that we continually further specialize and make our relationships more complex, because the number of people who live relatively comfortably on this planet couldn't even be alive if it weren't for that specialization.
   Suffice it to say that if we have a complete economic and technological breakdown, almost everyone will face certain death. But then again, they would have faced that anyway even if it had never existed in the first place. If we face an event like you're talking about, the complete breakdown of civilization, technology and economic fluidity, almost all of us will die no matter how much preparation we do. Yeah, maybe some people who have bug out shelters and large stores of supplies and tools will last a little longer than the rest of us, but I think the odds are against long term survival there too. Our best bet is to keep things moving in the positive direction they've been going for some time now.

I do get the merits of self-sufficiency however. I just think that self-sufficiency for human beings includes our proficiency at negotiation and trade.