FYI, there's nothing inherently socialist about what you describe. It's an artifact of countries that tried to implement communism in one way specifically. Soc

FYI, there's nothing inherently socialist about what you describe. It's an artifact of countries that tried to implement communism in one way specifically. Socialism at its core is simply the social ownership and democratic control of the means of production. It's pretty common to consider social democracy a form or derivative of socialism, and personally I think its the form of government that has come closest to the socialist ideals, even though they didn't fully implement it the way classical socialists or communists imagined. Communism just replaced the capitalists with a political elite. There's no difference between communism in practice, and simply one big corporation running everything. The people didn't gain social ownership, and certainly not democratic control. Planned economy was naive. But having a democratic state have majority ownership in large, key corporations that compete in an otherwise free market gets to the social ownership/democratic control part, but without the oppressive government part that inevitably results from the naive approach to achieving socialist ideals. > you can get some likeminded people together and start a commune You still have to buy the land. Probably you wouldn't have too much trouble finding relatively cheap and fertile land still, but it might be getting harder. It's not like you can just settle down wherever and live off the land. I think the main problem here is that if you'd like to grow a non-capitalist economy, you have absolutely no state support. All laws are written with capitalism assumed. So non-capitalist approaches have little chance to grow beyond a single commune. In fact, even if you tried to grow a new capitalist economy (in the sense of doing trade, not in the sense of Marx' definition), which isn't the state sanctioned variety of capitalism, you'd probably get jailed. Try starting a set of communes that trade goods with your own gold-standard currency, see what happens. So no, you can't opt out. You, personally, if you have enough money, can perhaps do a big one-time purchase which will let you partly opt out for just you and maybe a few other people. But you don't really get to have any economic activity with more than a handful of people. > or you can go sleep on a park bench and panhandle I don't think that's what the parent post had in mind. That's not really opting out at all. You're completely dependent on capitalism for surviving that way, even if you don't have a job yourself.