‘Everyday Utopia’ Review: The Road to Nowhere | Hacker News Reader

‘Everyday Utopia’ Review: The Road to Nowhere

wsj.com

29 pointsPetiver16 comments

It's really hard to build a utopia that scales. Israel in the kibbutz era came reasonably close. Originally, there was almost no private propertly and everybody was paid the same.[1] What they couldn't survive was a rising standard of living. Despite this, there are still about 130,000 people living in some form of kibbutz in Israel.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibbutz

Israel is also monocultural.

So much for implementing UBI then.

The kibbutz concept was to set up egalitarian agricultural communes that provided a decent but not luxurious quality of life. This was achieved through hard work. This is not Universal Basic Income at all. It's closer to Amish life, although most kibbutz were secular.

One writeup says that TV killed this. Kibbutzim could now see that others elsewhere were doing much better.

UBI went out the door in 2020. I used to support UBI, but after seeing what people did with the federal checks, I don't anymore. The level of fraud was also staggering.

Crypto scams peaking then is not an accident. People went nuts with the "free money"

https://archive.is/GTZCC

This must be the most stereotypical wall street journal writing imaginable. Anything communal or socially minded is evil, and things are bad but they can't be any better, the status quo must go on forever, so keep frowning and give up.

Shutting down asking the most basic questions like what is property, what makes something private, and who gets to decide that, only makes things worse.

The crazy part was that I was expecting so little, and comedically the WSJ stooped even lower on this one.

The problem is always going to be human nature. You will only achieve communal ownership of property by force. This force begets power for a small few and these powerful few will not willingly relinquish their power without force, perpetuating a cycle of misery and suffering.

We’ve tried this social experiment at nation scale several times already and it just doesn’t work.

You described what we have now.

Police power was threatened; now police in many cities intentionally make things worse to push back.

The rich were about to lose fiat power so they raised interest rates.

Those who can afford it fly all over regardless of the mess for the majority.

> The problem is always going to be human nature.

Or maybe human nature can be the greatest asset. If you teach them right. If they have better experiences in early life, without constant competition and stress put on them. If they don't grow up in a capitalist system. If kindness is the default response to your fellow human.

> You will only achieve communal ownership of property by force.

What makes you think that?

> If kindness is the default response to your fellow human.

You cannot guarantee constant kindness, you will need to answer to violent responses as well, and be sure that it doesn't snowball.

Most people will not willingly give up their property to the collective. Particularly those with a lot of property to lose.

I don’t own a lot, but I know personally you would be met with armed resistance if you tried to take my property.

Is your property usable by someone else, for something else, that it is better suited for?

For most people no, not in a meaningful way. Socialists call property that is really only valuable to an individual personal property, whereas right now it's all just property, and no matter what it can be privately owned.

Lots of people willingly give up property to a collective. Money is your property, and donating to charity is just that. Church collections basket? Collective. People willingly part ways with property for the collective all the time. People even more often contribute to what is a perceived collective but is an individual.

None of that scales up to nation level. It’s been tried and failed dozens of times. Leading to human suffering on calamitous scale. Socialist Utopia is as mythical as Shangri-La, El Dorado, or Atlantis.

The thing is every revolution turns out wrong. Yes, even the American Revolution. If we had stayed part of Britain we would have the NHS. Also we would have gotten rid of slavery thirty years earlier.

What a negative take on a book about hope for the future.

The book looks at the 1% of the people who live life away from our global system of capital worship. I have not read it yet, but listened to a long interview of Ghodsee about it and am excited to pick up a copy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com