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Comment by materielle | Hacker News Reader

What if I don’t care about affording more things? And instead want to live in an ethical society that prioritizes stability and universal access to housing, healthcare, and education?

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It's perfectly legal for you and like-minded people to set up a commune, and create the society you want.

Or join an existing one.

BTW, the best I can figure is the average commune member quits after about 2 years, cured of the notion that communism is for them.

Same is true for most eco villages, back to the land farms, etc.

It’s a mix of the lifestyle not being exactly what people thought plus them getting culty. In many cases it’s more the latter than the former.

What happens is people get tired of other people not working very diligently, but still getting an equal share.

That’s a real aspect, but only one dimension. Nonetheless, it’s telling that it’s what you distill the entire problem down to. There are many other problems that make the problem hard:

a) these communities often depend on consensus decision making. Problems that require collective action get nearly impossible when the society gets too big

b) People underestimate how much they depend on greater society in a modern context

c) It’s normal for future generations to have evolving values. The original idealistic notions tend to lose their luster to those who were born into it

There are others more unique to communes, but I highlighted those because they also make it hard for the inverse libertarian ideal to work as well. Meaning it has to do as much with human nature as any ideology.

Would you extend that same sentiment to the extremes of the libertarian crowd too?

I can answer that if you can explain what you mean by extreme libertarianism.

I can go into detail, but for the sake of the argument let’s define it in the Norquist fashion: a government small enough that it can be drowned in the bathtub. A stricter definition might be anything beyond and to include minarchism.

You'll need to be more specific.

“beyond and to include minarchism” is pretty specific.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night-watchman_state

Ok, I see that. But you cannot set up such a community within the current US, as it runs afoul of the primacy of Federal law.

A commune, however, can be.

I think the argument that minarchists take is that federal law should be modified to only cover military, courts, and police. A coherent libertarian could only interface with those, although it would be difficult and probably start to look very much like the commune types. The Jeffersonian yeoman farmer ideal seems like the clearest example. The larger point is that both extremes seem incompatible with modernity.

I don't think it would look like a commune at all. More like the early United States, excluding the slave South.

Right, that’s the yeoman farmer ideal I brought up. I just don’t think that works with anything remotely like modern society so it’s a romantic but impractical idea. IMO it can only work in relatively small groups, just like the commune. Once society reaches a certain level of complexity, necessary practical tradeoffs erode that romanticism.

> And instead want to live in an ethical society that prioritizes stability and universal access to housing, healthcare, and education?

Then talk to your local NIMBY. Housing crisis is not due to capitalism being evil, but due to constraining people from building. Healthcare is getting better all the time, we had MASSIVE breakthroughs this year at ASCO (which were made possible by big pharma!). As for education yeah, it could be better but it's completely tangential to the topic.

I think a lot of these statements are, at best, incomplete. For example, healthcare quality can get better while access gets lower, still resulting in worse outcomes for patients. Or, housing cost should be normalized based on size since until recently, houses have been getting larger on average.

i think the reason for your deluge of downvotes is that a society the promotes more things becoming affordable is one that prioritizes stability. universal access to housing, healthcare, and education that people want is only possible in a society that is immensely productive.

Exactly. Those big ticket items that people are pissed off about are "things" too.

Welcome to the forever dissapointed club.

The society you desire can’t exist unfortunately as much as I’ve thought it could and worked for it

There’s no utopia but that doesn’t mean you can’t bend society in one direction or another.

Nobody is talking about utopia

Society has always (yes always) “bent” toward dominating hierarchies because individuals want the stability of being part of the dominating group.

>The society you desire can’t exist

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