Comments Elsewhere

Owen:

In order to avoid misunderstandings, maybe you could say a bit about what you mean by a free market practice when you say that a voluntary commune, even if genuinely consensual amongst all the parties, isn’t one? For reference, when I say free market, I mean any network of economic transactions between consenting actors which respects individual liberty and property. Voluntary communes count because, as I see it, one of the things you can do with property is own it in common. Is your understanding of what counts as a free market practice different from mine?

(As for details and worries: children would be in the same situation that they are in now with individualized ownership of property: they start out being born into the arrangements that their parents have made, and live according to those arrangements that are made by their caretakers. Once they are old enough they have to decide whether to take an adult role — in a commune, I suppose this would mean becoming full stakeholders in the commune and voluntarily taking up the rights and responsibilities that go with that — or else lighting out on their own. For people who want to move in but isn’t interested in the communal stuff — the question here is not whether they have a right to rent or buy land in the area (everyone does), but rather whether they can find anyone there to rent or sell the land to them. If the land is commonly owned, then they would have to secure consent from all the current owners, just as, if someone wanted to buy the car that my wife and I used to own together, BOTH my wife and I would have to consent to the transfer. The question, then, is whether folks within the commune are interested in keeping that land within the commune, or are fine with transferring it outside. Whatever decision they’d make, this would only imperil a voluntary commune to the extent that the people within it no longer wish to maintain it. If enough are still on board to block, they either won’t sell, or will only sell when enough members feel that it won’t cause problems for continued operations. Of course, the exact details will depend on the exact decision-making procedure they’ve adopted.)