This guy, Terence Gillespie, had the 3rd most popular LRC article yesterday. So I checked out his site, and he's got a pretty neat self-help empowerment thing going on. It's like someone took Gary North's ideas about establishing your "calling" and put it into action.
This article in particular (not the one on LRC) is interesting, because I have been considering getting my family back together, if not under the same roof, then perhaps in the same city.
Why I Live With My In-Laws!
I don't think it is possible to live a more consistently libertarian life, without collaborating with family and close neighbors. The notion of the ALL and other activist organizations like the FSP, that we can ad hoc organize offline communities via the internet, after several years seems to be a non-starter. I think there are a lot of reasons for this, and it is important to recognize these obstacles to success if they must be overcome.
Family, depending on your relation with them, does afford a primitive in home division of labour, economy of scale, and certainly satisfies the sort of trust that is very difficult to establish between strangers, or even casual lovers.
I'd be interested to hear thoughts on this. But be sure to read the article in order to understand where i am coming from.
before I married 7 years ago we lived this way. it was my great-grandmother, grandmother, my parents, my brother and sister, and I. My great-grandmother died in the house. We all took care of her til the day she died. My father is gone too. So my grandmother and mother live together. My brother, sister, and I are all married but we all still live close by. We help each other when possible and are getting into laboring in different ways to trade with each other. My wife cans and we had six gardens this year and are doing more next year (local farms help to give even more to our storage). My brother and wife are making their own food from scratch more. And my sister and husband are going to start having a huge garden next year (they say). We are probably going to get to the point where we will be able to trade with each other - small at first - but it seems plausible. We've been talking about it. My wife's mother lives close too and we had a garden at her house with hers and did work in each other's garden's all summer to help cut down on labor (they were huge garden's). My sister's husband has hunted longer than I have and I haven't for some years, but we are talking about going out hunting for deer this year together. He's going to let me borrow one of his gun's since I only have a bow. My wife's mother has hunting rifle's and my wife has slowly talked with her about letting me use them - that still needs worked on. With all the work done this year (more than any other year including woodburner fixed and getting lots of wood at my wife's mothers in her woods and getting supplies from my sister's, etc...). So next year we'll be able to expand much further cause it takes a lot of work to keep building upon. I'm looking forward to the trading between our family we might develop. Never know this could get bigger - such as with neighbors. We have some land to expand upon.
Our family is smaller now, but we live close enough to work at each other's house. I cut my mother's grass a lot this summer and I dug out her garden. And I mentioned how throughout the summer how we worked at my wife's mother's huge gardens (hours of work).