Just Curious

Hutterites and the Puritans

Hutterite Brethren is one of the smaller Anabaptist denominations (the others being Mennonites, Amish & the Church of the Brethren). It is interesting to note the stark contrast between their belief in communal living and the Puritan (Protestant) belief in individualism.

After I've posted the quote on "Christianity and Socialism," my buddy Patrick posted a reply, noting that it is classical liberalism, and free market capitalism, not socialism, that is a Christian virtue. This is absolutely right if we look at the Puritanic sects, including the various Reformed Churches and the Presbyterians. To a lesser degree Lutherans (especially those in Northern Germany, like Hannover) also hold a similarly individualistic & libertarian worldview.

So whether socialism/capitalism is a Christian virtue really depends on what sect one is looking at, I guess. In the Hutterite colonies (mainly scattered across Saskatchewan, Manitoba, North Dakota, Montana & Iowa), private property does not exist and every physical entity is owned by the community. The earning of money intended for private spending is frowned upon, and both youth and elderlies are taken care of by the community. In some sense it's a more ideal version of the "People's Communes" in 1960 China.

Interestingly, these colonies tend to be very small. As soon as they exceed a certain size, individual Hutterites will be chosen at random to leave the colonies and build new ones. This probably shows that socialism (or in our case communism) to a certain degree does work, but only within very small & isolated communities. As soon as the economic structure expands beneath a certain point, centralized planning will simply cease to work since information is no longer perfectly known by every player in the system, and decision-makers had to make flawed decision based upon incomplete data. According to Ludwig von Mises, a leading libertarian economist, capitalism "works" mainly because information is perfectly communicated to everyone via the price system, whereas in a socialist system, since price is either artificially fixed by a government or non-existent (as in the Hutterite communities), it's mechanisms could no longer provide any meaningful information regarding each player's preferences for different goods.

This is the orthodox libertarian stance, disputed by economists of other persuasions. There was a famous price debate between von Mises and Oskar Lange, a leading Polish socialist economist, who worked at the Cowles Commission at the University of Chicago, back in the 30s and 40s. Lange essentially argued that with the introduction of partially formalized non-linear systems into economic modelling, socialist manufacturers could at least operate *as though* there is a price system serving as indicator of preferences. Unfortunately Lange died in 1965, before the Nobel Memorial Prize in economics was founded, otherwise, he would definitely have got one for his contributions to linear programming; and it is a real shame that von Mises, despite his longevity, never was recognized by the Nobel committee. (His chief protege F.A. Hayek did get one in 1974, with Gunnar Myrdal, an intellectual foe and a Swedish welfare socialist.)

posted by James Chang @ 9:56 AM