You've hit on a key aspect of many discussions I have had with leftists and assorted Luddites who have this romanticized view of a lifestyle without machinery, IC engines, electricity, etc. The fact is, they've never had to live that way, and so don't understand what it was really like. For those who have, it was a very arduous, difficult lifestyle, a daily struggle of hard labor to secure the basics of survival. It involved dawn-to-dusk labor and nothing else, and I'm talking difficult, sweaty, physical labor of a type 99% of the population has never done (certainly not the elite Luddites, for whom typing on a keyboard is their idea of "work", or welfare types in the cities). It was a lifestyle where very few children ever went beyond a grade school education, because they had to go to work on the farm. The average lifespan ended in your forties, because half of your children would die in childhood.
So maybe the thing to do is to take these agrarian romanticists and Luddities out to the wilderness, leave them there, and say, okay, you wanted it, you got it, you're on your own. Check back with them every so often. My guess is as soon as they can't keep warm at night, or go hungry for a few days, they'll be crying to go back to their heated loft apartments, ready to jump into their car and head to the nearest McDonald's.
These people are still delighted that Pol Pot kept the Cambodian population from exploding...
Didn't the History Channel or someone do a series along these lines? What little I saw of it, I seem to remember the people not exactly enjoying the frontier lifestyle.