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It seems like Israel's Kibbutzim are experiancing some of the same problems others have had who have tried to have a society based on collective ownership.
I think one of the problems with these modern collective societies is that they may have misunderstood the indigenous communal societies that they were basing their collectivism on. Many indigenous societies practiced collectivism but it was done voluntarily and when they saw the need for it. Their collectivism wasn't dictated by a government. Plus many indigenous societies also had private ownership.
The article hit upon a major problem. What do you do with those that just flat out refuse to pull their share of the load? I saw this for years way back when I was a union worker. The goldbrickers fared just as well as the producers and that's just the way it was. They allowed no provision for the more industrious workers. In fact, I would say they were quite hostile to any idea of individual reward.
If you go far enough into collectivism that you get to the "everybody's completely equal" society then it's probably not going to work out because the work incentives are reduced too much. On the other hand, if you go far enough into the individualist libertarian society you might end up with a situation like that of the Gilded Age. Neither situation is preferable.
The post goes properly toward one of the central problems of neocon-like reasoning -- a denial of the duality of society. There are properly individual roles and properly collective roles that each of us is expected and in some cases required to play.
While trumpeting all their Personal Responsibility® rhetoric, it is these latter personal responsibilities that so many of our sovereign citizen, rugged individualist, self-made-man type posters simply want to walk away from. Or one could be less kind and simply refer to these as the what's-in-it-for-me, free-lunch types, but either way, they end up not wanting to hold up their end of the bargain, and that sort of thing can cause stresses within the social system...
It's unromantic but true that capitalism is the (financial and social) economic system closest to human nature. Collectivism is a re-action to capitalism. Capitalism will always triumph.
Last edited by delusianne; 04-19-2008 at 10:16 AM..
Reason: changed "unfortunate" to "unromantic"
I agree somewhat with Saganista that there is a dual situation. Collectivism in pooling of resources, dividing labor based on individual strengths while still valuing each of the divisions as necessary for the survival of the whole, and working together to provide common environmental and structural needs is needed to keep any society going. But if you build in a disincentive to work, then you have problems, so you need to have some reward for work and some negative for non work. Amish collectives shun. Nuns have severe social punishments in their collective. We create a disincentive to work when our workfare programs do not pay the prevailing wage for the actual labor, or when we do not provide a graduated process to wean people off welfare, or when we have a huge jump in taxes that make people earning more through work, take home less becasue they worked harder. Or when you take earned income and tax it at a higher rate than capital gains.
The day government provides for all of my needs is the day I will quit working. I encourage all hard working Americans to do the same to put an end to the cult of collectivism.
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