The Warmth of Collectivism

John Stossel
Tue, 13 Jan 2026 13:34:14 -0800
Opinion

"Replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism!" says my new socialist mayor.

Sounds so nice ...

No more greedy capitalists hoarding wealth. People share. It's the socialist dream.
Updated: Wed Jan 14, 2026

"Replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism!" says my new socialist mayor.

Sounds so nice ...

No more greedy capitalists hoarding wealth. People share. It's the socialist dream.

What will replace capitalism and individualism? One model is the commune - that socialist system where people share, rather than greedily chasing money.

In my new video, TikTokers claim capitalism is "ending." They sing about the beauty of communes. One asks, desperately, "Where is my commune?!"

Good question. They're hard to find because they keep failing.

One of the most famous was founded in 1825 In New Harmony, Indiana. Private property was banned and residents shared everything.

The result?

After just two years, most residents left.

Today, New Harmony is a tourist attraction, meant to "inspire progressive thought," says the assistant director of the expensively renovated site. "It just has some magic here."

But New Harmony's magic only exists today because a nepo baby poured her rich father's money into it. Robert Blaffer started Humble Oil, which became ExxonMobil. After his death, his daughter spent millions of her father's dollars turning the failed commune into an expensive museum.

The "magic" tourists experience in New Harmony comes from capitalism, the only system that creates lasting wealth.

The "warmth of collectivism" fails again and again.

It's failing now in Cuba, North Korea, Nicaragua and Venezuela.

It was tried and abandoned in the Soviet Union, Mongolia, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Angola, Mozambique, Benin, the Congo, Somalia, Grenada and Cambodia.

Even China and Vietnam's leaders, to allow their countries to prosper, felt they had to give up pure socialism and allow private property and capitalism.

But my new mayor still wants to give "the warm of collectivism" a shot.

If he were my age, he would have been a hippie. Hippie communes were popular then.

One in Tennessee called The Farm forbade members to have their own money or property. Everyone shared everything.

"Mothers would nurse each other's babies — other parents would take care of you ... " said a former member.

"If you want to become a member of the community," warned The Farm's lawyer, "you got to put everything you have in the pot. We're doing this for a lifetime!"

But they couldn't do it for a lifetime. They couldn't even keep it for a dozen years.

There just wasn't enough money, says the commune's bookkeeper: "Everybody was saying ... there's not enough food, not enough vegetables, not enough diapers, shoes. All things the children needed."

Only when the commune allowed members to own things, and keep profit from their labor, was The Farm able to survive.

Residents now say, "We're not socialists anymore. We have our own money."

New York's Oneida Community was founded as a free-love, socialist commune, where "every man in the community was essentially married to every woman and all the property was shared."

But Oneida survives today only because they dropped socialism and became capitalists, selling expensive Oneida silverware.

Likewise, an Iowa commune, Amana Colonies, survives because they abandoned socialism to sell appliances.

Some Americans (falsely) think Israeli communes, Kibbutzim, succeeded. But they mostly failed, despite getting heavy taxpayer subsidies. Why?

Yaron Brook of the Ayn Rand Institute explains, "People envied one another ... and treated one another really, really bad. It's obvious why. Some people worked hard. Others didn't. Yet they had exactly the same."

The surviving few Kibbutzim are capitalist. Members own property and earn their own money.

The "warmth of collectivism" doesn't last.

But socialists never admit that their communes fail.

"Because to them it's a moral ideal!" says Brook. "Moral striving for the good, even though it's a complete disaster and a complete failure everywhere and anywhere it is tried."

No matter what my new mayor and other "progressives" say, the only thing that works — the only thing that really makes life better for people — is private ownership and capitalism.