I can go into detail, but for the sake of the argument let’s define it in the Norquist fashion: a government small enough that it can be drowned in the bathtub. A stricter definition might be anything beyond and to include minarchism.
I think the argument that minarchists take is that federal law should be modified to only cover military, courts, and police. A coherent libertarian could only interface with those, although it would be difficult and probably start to look very much like the commune types. The Jeffersonian yeoman farmer ideal seems like the clearest example. The larger point is that both extremes seem incompatible with modernity.
Right, that’s the yeoman farmer ideal I brought up. I just don’t think that works with anything remotely like modern society so it’s a romantic but impractical idea. IMO it can only work in relatively small groups, just like the commune. Once society reaches a certain level of complexity, necessary practical tradeoffs erode that romanticism.
That’s a real aspect, but only one dimension. Nonetheless, it’s telling that it’s what you distill the entire problem down to. There are many other problems that make the problem hard:
a) these communities often depend on consensus decision making. Problems that require collective action get nearly impossible when the society gets too big
b) People underestimate how much they depend on greater society in a modern context
c) It’s normal for future generations to have evolving values. The original idealistic notions tend to lose their luster to those who were born into it
There are others more unique to communes, but I highlighted those because they also make it hard for the inverse libertarian ideal to work as well. Meaning it has to do as much with human nature as any ideology.
Or join an existing one.