I’m a bit puzzled by your hypothetical. You’re not earning money, so what exactly are you going to do with the power you’re generating? Apparently you’re not watching TV, communicating on the internet, running irrigation pumps, or even using light bulbs because you need money to buy machines to do these things. It’s also not clear where you’re getting your seeds, farming tools, and building materials. Now you can argue that you’ve bought all this stuff before you started your commune, but that’s not fomenting a revolution; that’s getting rich and retiring. Which the government wholeheartedly approves of.
What else does the government care about in your enormous community of drop outs? Well, you’re going to be performing enough agriculture to feed the millions of people who decided that living like sunflowers in the Wyoming wilderness is a fine lifestyle. If you’re farming on an industrial scale to feed all these people, you’re no longer on what could be styled a family farm and you’d probably have to fill in a bunch of forms and be forced to accept subsidies for not planting corn and stuff like that. Enough farming takes place on your property and you might have to pay people a minimum wage – that’s sort of a gray area, I’d guess.
Given the lack of TV and internet and the lack of anything else to do in the 8 month Wyoming winters, you’re going to be having a bunch of kids. The Feds (or at least the state) are going to want to know that the kids are being vaccinated, fed and educated. So, more paperwork.
Once your population gets high enough, someone is going to start asking questions about where you all are taking your morning constitutionals, if you know what I mean. The Feds might not get involved, but the local governments are going to be interested in making sure you’re not getting human waste into the water table.
I suspect that if the world were made up of people like you and you put this to the test, you’d find out that you are a human being and, as you pointed out in the OP, human beings suck.
Not to split hairs, but they aren’t wholly separate communities in quite the way the OP proposes. I was thinking of Oneida, which formed on a collectively chosen set of principles, lived an encapsulated life for 25+ years while still engaged in commerce with the surrounding town and communities, and then disintegrated after a final ten years of breakdown.
However unappealing living in rural idiocy may be, it was the common lot before industrialization and shall be again. What once was old shall be new… When the last memory of the United States’ existence shall have passed from the earth, people will still live in tribes and in primitive conditions.
Much of the criticism centres on the fact that the products of civilization shall be unavailable without compromises and submission. Actually, we got along for millions of years without internet or vaccinations. And most other stuff. I would not say it was desirable, but it would be the height of stupidity to suppose primitive tribes-people are automatically unhappy. or even dejected. And in those distant pre-Monsanto days it was allowable for farmers to save seeds from one year to the next if they were wise.
Societial problems such as child abuse, wife-beating and drug-taking are not solely rural problems and unknown in the confined overcrowded environs of the big cities.
Governments — of any type — have as a main function the raising of taxes, what they then do with it is secondary: provided one gives to them with a generous heart, most governments over the globe will turn a blind eye to much that should concern them.
The Old Believers have communities which have been scattered over the world, from Argentina to China to Turkey to Canada to New Jersey. If as uninteresting and anti modern life as any other agrarian religious community. they do not seem totally unsuccessful. If the OP chooses somewhere along the Amazon instead of Wyoming there is less chance of being bothered by modern governance provided the community is respectful to that governance and to all the neighbours and greets both with free-handed beneficence.
Yes, but those dirt poor peasants actually did participate in a basic economy which violates one aspect of the OP. If you spend money or barter, you have to pay taxes. They also, once the population grew above a certain point, formed various kinds of governments, and once you do that, you haven’t really escaped the Man, because someone needs to get paid for doing all the admin, even if you do sacrifice him to the Corn God after the next harvest.
I did forget to mention in my previous comments is that one role of the government is to conscript those dirt poor peasants in time of war, and believe me, they ain’t going to be able to get out of that one by living on a commune if the excrement hits the fan.
The analogy I’m thinking of is a child complaining about his parents. Sure, the parents place rules upon the child that he doesn’t like and they make him do chores around the house. But the rules are actually for the child’s own good and the parents are providing a lot more to the child than the child is to the parents. But the child takes all the stuff that benefits him for granted and just focuses on the things he doesn’t like.
Freemen are the same way. They like the fact that there are roads and running water and electricity and internet access and air they can breathe and an absence of foreign invaders and roving bands of outlaws and smallpox. But they take all of that for granted as they complain about their taxes and government regulations. They don’t seem to appreciate that somebody had to pay for all that stuff they wanted.
Bingo. And you can’t - cannot, can not - make them see it. Freemen, ardent Libertarians, the old fart across the street who votes no on every town improvement project… blind as bats. They got theirs, still have it, are convinced they “earned” every bit of it without any help from anyone… and anyone who wants the same now is just a freeloader and probably an illegal.
The Amish are in no way isolated like the OP is suggesting. They have non-Amish neighbors. They use money, do business with others, have incomes, and pay taxes. They sell some of their goods in farmers’ markets in Philadelphia and elsewhere. Some even have outside jobs with secular companies.
They also take advantage of modern medicine. Many of them are dependent on it due to a prevalence of genetic problems. Admittedly, those are caused by self-imposed social isolation so even their semi-isolation is probably doomed to fail at some point. Although before they suffer some sort of genetic collapse I think it’s likely they’ll instead dwindle away over time from younger generations leaving the culture.
To be fair, our government spends plenty on social programs that aren’t as intrinsically necessary for maintaining civilization. Plenty of libertarians recognize this, which is why they are advocating for libertarianism and not anarchy. The sovereign citizens are a lost cause though.
As to the OP, you seem to take it as a given that a communal society would be superior to welfare capitalism, and that the only reason communism hasn’t succeeded is because of selfish actors. But I don’t think you can make such an assumption. Trade leads to specialization which leads to surplus of wealth, because each person can focus on doing what they do best instead of doing a hundred different things mediocrely. Since your commune would have fewer people than would the US and countries that trade with the United States, it would have less specialization and be worse off. Even if it “were made up of people like me [i.e. the OP]”, it still wouldn’t work because a rational person would realize that they would have a better life by participating in society.
The kibbutz system worked well in Israel. It wasn’t nearly as extreme as what the OP is proposing, but it shows that a community of like-minded people can function properly at least for a while.
Just as anecdotal input. I lived in Wyoming for 20 years, Green River and Laramie. It’s really cold, every year we had some -40F. I think there was one year where it didn’t snow before summer was over. The growing season is pretty short. You’d be better served going carnivore rather than vegan.
48% if Wyoming is owned by the US government. So you won’t be buying that.
Also, commune or not, education is required. You’re going to need schools.
People, happy little communicks or not, do get sick. You’re going to need hospitals, or at least doctors.
You’ll probably want to get from one place to another (it’s 400 miles across Wyoming along I80), you might want some roads.
Even with the best of intentions problems arise that need someone making decisions. You’ll need a legal system of some sort.
And so on and so forth. Pretty soon you have a government. This costs money. Way, way more money than you have set aside to pay property taxes.
As far as I know all communes (Christinia in Netherlands comes to mind) only work for a short time unless there’s a well run government sitting just of to one side that you can run to when there are problems.
Wyoming can’t just quit itself, because the US Constitution requires the Federal government to guarantee each state a republican form of government. And Wyoming can’t just stop sending representatives and senators to DC, because its citizens are guaranteed representatives and senators under the US Constitution. That’s just two issues. The US Constitution guarantees certain rights to everyone, and simply shutting down a state government is likely to impact those rights (and off the top of my head, there’s a number of those issues that I don’t think would be resolvable).
But, let’s just say that somehow all the legal hurdles were overcome, and Wyoming did cease to exist as a state. It’s still territory of the United States, which means that the US can exercise full power over the area.
There are many of us who consider not letting poor people starve to death in the streets to fall under the category of maintaining civilization. Even if you decide you don’t have any moral obligation to help anyone else, you should consider the practical issues. Those people aren’t going to die quietly. They’re going to come and try to take what you have first. So providing people with basic living necessities is either a moral act or a means of avoiding civil war - but either way, you wouldn’t have the level of civilization you’d want without it.