More to the point, I’m excited about the prospect of reviving this concept, as part of revitalizing mutual aid societies in general. A few friends and I are working on deigning a hybrid (individualist/collective, public/private, for-profit/nfp, etc.) suburban (so, urban/rural) farming community that would seek to ultimately encompass all the essential functions for a self-contained medeival-type village. Only, without vassals and lords and such. So, basically an entirely horizontal agrarian village. And this concept looks like a natural extension of that concept.

Specifically, this article provides a great basis for designing our contemporary equivalent of lodges so as to avoid some of the potential downsides. I would want to toss out belief in a supreme being as a criterion, and define moral character mostly in terms of having adequate levels of both self-reliance and esprit de corps, for instance. Ideally, we would only need to exclude people if they were “bad risks” to the success of the endeavor (lack useful skills, are allergic to work or antisocial). Ethnicity is largely irrelevant.

Anyway, excellent article and I’m stoked to have stumbled upon it!

Although it may be true that some of these lodges and benevolent societies etc that you refer to were exclusive, voluntary community organizations and churches picked up the slack. This is still a preferred situation to a state run health care system. I know whereof I speak. I have live in Canada where we have a government monopoly health care system that provides listed services free of charge to all citizens. Since its inception in the 1960′s the trend has been to a continuous process of delisting services that are covered, putting caps on the amounts, and other restrictions on the use of the services. Also the ques for most medical services is reminiscent of the Soviet Union. When I moved to a new city recently, I could not find one single GP that was taking on new patients. Luckily my next door neighbour, a Russian immigrant who had started a new clinic, agreed to take me on.

We are not talking about which system is without flaws. We are talking about which system performs the best and is most sensitive to the needs of its customers. It would be a huge mistake for the US to adopt a Canadian style health system when there are other far more effective alternatives.

1. These organizations were exclusive. They often would admit only persons of certain racial, ethnic, or religious backgrounds. Which means that if you came from a different background, you were SOL; in the larger cities you could probably find one that fit your background, but in the smaller towns and rural areas, not so much.

2. If you could not afford the dues, you were SOL; while the dues seem modest, if you adjust for inflation, not so much.

3. A social or economic crisis could overcome a fraternal organization’s resources. My understanding is that this was what happened in the Great Depression.