Bingo.
Very true! 
For a large scale example you might have to, though, and when the Huterites were the most successful, for example, they did their sharing on a pretty large scale, again quoting from the Journal of Political Economy article:
“Huterian communities were established all over Moravia. Loserth names eighty-six towns near which they had been set Up.3… a Huterian Bruderhof… housed anywhere up to two thousand, and probably averaged between three hundred and five hundred souls.4 The Huterian population in Moravian days has been variously estimated, the estimates ranging from twelve thousand to one hundred thousand.5”
Source:
Bertha W. Clark, The Huterian Communities: II, Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 32, No. 4 (Aug., 1924), pp. 468-486
Sanchez given that this thread has been dead for about a year and a half I have two questions. 1) how did you find it? 2) What led you to comment on it again?
Jaakko Ojala where/how did you find all this wonderful economic data on the Hutterites? I have always been at a loss to find historical/economic data on their communes.
The voluntary aspect of it is the important one. Any lifestyle that doesn’t invade others’ freedom is surely possible, probable, and allowable under libertarianism, and a community is a group of people with a mutual contract going.
I had a Hutterite friend when I was a teenager, and I was able to visit her family’s home once. Here’s what I witnessed:
A very peaceful community with a basic but comfortable standard of living, and a functioning system for arbitration of disputes and decision making. As far as I remember, it amounted to the older men making decisions among themselves and the rest of the community agreeing to follow along. Individuals were given the choice of officially joining or leaving when they turned 18 or 21, I can’t remember which.
The kids went to public school in the area. Many of them had the expected issues with fitting in or justifying their families’ rules to themselves and their peers. Which is only normal for teenagers, but these kids had more of that to deal with than most. As you might imagine, there was an enormous percentage of them dropping out of the society and going away to college or work.
The community in my area did not succeed either financially OR in terms of membership as I recall. The majority of the members went to Germany or something, and my friend to another community on the West coast.
I don’t see anything wrong with the goals of that community but the voluntary aspect was entirely necessary to avoid total breakdown of discipline. A VERY large number of their youth were just raring for the opportunity to engage in all the disallowed behaviors. And I would have a hard time demonstrating that their community was “successful” in non-economic ways. Yes and no, I guess.
Ooh. I should qualify. My IMPRESSION was they left town because their community failed financially. I couldn’t verify that. Of course, they might have left because so many kids were opting out that they wanted to get away from the terrible influence of Americans…I’m not sure about that.
Even so. I did not witness much member retention. I would judge the health of a group on that basis, to start with. Especially since the dropout rate seemed to be the result of exposure to outside ideas via mixing with non-Hutterite children.
Personally, I’d have dropped out on the basis of the food alone. But I could see the strongly escapist appeal to many people, so I expect that’s where the group’s longevity comes from.