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Comment by jlawson | Hacker News Reader

The point is that it doesn't scale.

This community can only exist because it's a tiny minority surrounded by a much larger, depersonalized, "dirty" society which handles all the big problems for them. Problems including: National defense, international relations, technological research and infrastructure, advanced education, manufacture/import/transport of all kinds of exotic goods and medicines, law enforcement, care of the elderly.

It's easy to say it's a better way to live, until you realize that it can only exist because it's held up by all the people paying the costs of the "worse" way.

As a thought experiment: Think of how much different our larger society could be if there was some sort of alien galactic society that handled those kinds of problems for us.

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That may be true, but is that a result of the larger society being "dirty"?

I think people who worship competition take for granted the fundamental importance of cooperation, indeed to what degree cooperation handles many of the big problems for them.

Dude, it’s a profitable farm. The only main difference is how they allocate ownership and organise labour. Your criticism applies equally to all farms.

Not really profitable. It's largely a tax dodge actually. They avoid using money to artificially underreport their production and consumption. If they paid tax on the real values, would they still be profitable? Maybe, maybe not, but it would be a tougher situation.

My criticism is that it doesn't scale and they're freeloaders. And you can bet if enough people started dodging taxes like this, the IRS would be on the case. But it's small scale so they get away with it.

I don't think they're doing something morally wrong, to be clear. Just that it can't scale.

Other farms pay tax fully, and my criticism doesn't apply.

“Eating food you grew yourself” is a tax dodge? What about making your own improvements to your house? Cooking your own food? Doing your own laundry? You could pay for any number of services, with the associated tax. So you’re about as much of a tax dodge as these folks. But that’s a radical expansion of the notion of taxable economic activity. The IRS trying to get that notion accepted as law would be practically unthinkable.

There was a time, for that matter, where most of the U.S. economy was agrarian. The world still worked. There were fewer government services, to be sure- but if most people are members of semi-self-sufficient communities, fewer services would be needed.

Growing food yourself is one thing. But that's not what we're talking about.

Eating food grown and prepared by other people in a community of 70+ people, in exchange for your labor in other areas, and paying no tax on any of it.... tax dodge.

How many people does it have to be, in your opinion, before it's a tax dodge?

I've given this one a lot of thought. Ordinarily, you're supposed to pay tax on the fair market value of goods and services received in return for your labor in barter transactions.

However, East Wind is incorporated as a 501(d) organization, which is what monasteries use. For more info on 501(d) orgs: https://www.irs.gov/irm/part7/irm_07-025-023

I can't find anything specific, but I think that since they share their income and produce as a collective, they're only liable for taxes on their share of the income that the collective produces. Monks don't have to pay taxes on the value they get from the monastery vegetable garden.

Tax avoidance is a time-honored American tradition. This is one way to do so. It sounds like they've done their legal homework if they've managed to survive 30 years without IRS trouble.

how is it a tax dodge? Please explain that

So what? The reason Google and Apple and Amazon and any other business is also due to a lot of that stuff as well.

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