Alternate Economic System Concept

This is not practical for the modern era, but it's still interesting to think about (in my opinion).

Imagine that almost everyone in a nation belongs to a community where (almost) everyone in that town has a job in a single industry. For instance, there'd be textile communities, woodworking communities, farming communities, fishing communities, and so on. The community itself is its own corporation, belonging to no one person (though it'd have managers), but rather to the village. In the middle of it all would be a city where goods could be exchanged, allowing the goods of one community to get into the hands of another community.

What do you think?

Dassault Papillon: Basically each town would specialize in a single industry, and the town's industry would be a collective effort, with everyone in that town belonging to the same "business". The town would double as a kind of corporation, where every person in the town collectively owned it.

Dassault Papillon: My thoughts can be summed up in one word.

Why?

admin: There is a degree of practicality to it. The geographical features of certain locations would be utilized to their full potential. If you have an area with abnormally fertile soil you don't want to build stuff on that land. Rather, you want to use every bit of that land for farming. Likewise, if you have an area that is abundant with useful rocks (such as gravel, marble, or granite), you want to use the entirety of that land for mining.
Also, the entire community works together for whatever service they specialize in.

Dassault Papillon: I think whatever efficiency gain you would see from the system working would be entirely offset by the costs of maintaining the system. Seems like the perfect environment for diseconomies of scale.

This is basically what the Soviets did with entire regions. It had the added bonus of ensuring that many regions would lack the means to rise up in violent protest, and ensured that when the whole system collapsed, entire nations had no means of supporting themselves.

I remember reading a book by a guy in Moldova just after it got independence. Almost the entire country's job was growing wine. They were doing it pretty tough.

It's a model that would fit nicely into a Socialist system. I'm not opposed to it, but like most socialist systems, I don't think it'd work.