Can collectivist economics co-exist with Individual rights?
I have often heard that collectivism and individual rights can't co-exist because they are opposites. On the surface this appears to be accurate, but is there any historical examples of societies which have managed to preserve the full rights of the individual, while successfully maintaining a collective economy? To clarify, when I say 'individual rights' I am referring to the natural rights as philosophically developed & articulated by Western philosophers from Aristotle to Locke. The ideas of the Magna Carte to the US Constitution & Declaration of Independence. The fundamental philosophy of the "enlightenment" that all men are born free & equal and all posses the rights endowed by nature. The idea that legitimate leadership (governance) is dependent on the consent of the governed. The concept that a free man cannot be compelled to perform under threat, duress or coercion, but rather that he participates and contributes to society, by his own free will. That he enters the social contract by his own determination and cannot be forced to do so.
The examples in real life of such economies are always coercive. If people wanted cooperative economies on any scale (incl co-ops that exist under US economy) they could have them naturally with no full-scale form being imposed.A book to get you thinking about this would be : Third Ways: How Bulgarian Greens, Swedish Housewives, and Beer-Swilling Englishmen Created Family-Centered Economies - And Why They Disappeared
it is interesting that Jamestown started fully collectivist and was almost destroyed but switched to a free economiy with rights and did much better. They could have continued collectivist but it had failed.
