The origins of our Thanksgiving Day celebration provide some very important economic lessons about the original dismal failure of Bernie Sanders-style socialism, collectivism, and common property that resulted in starvation and death for the early Pilgrims, and the subsequent success of private property, the profit motive, and capitalism that led to the prosperity and abundance for the Pilgrims that we still celebrate today nearly 400 years later. Here are some accounts of the economic lessons we’ll be celebrating tomorrow:
1. Lessons From A Capitalist Thanksgiving by Jerry Bower based on the memoirs of Plymouth governor William Bradford:
The first Thanksgiving was a celebration of abundance after a period of socialism and starvation. The members of the Plymouth colony had arrived in the New World with a plan for collective property ownership. Reflecting the current opinion of the aristocratic class in the 1620s, their charter called for farmland to be worked communally and for the harvests to be shared.
You probably will not be surprised to hear that the colonists starved. Men were unwilling to work to feed someone else’s children. Women were unwilling to cook for other women’s husbands. Fields lay largely untilled and unplanted.
Famine came as soon as they ate through their provisions. After famine came plague. Half the colony died. Unlike most socialists, they learned from their mistakes, giving each person a parcel of land to tend to for themselves. The colonists threw off the statist intellectual fashions of their day.
The results were overwhelmingly beneficial. Men worked hard, even though before they had constantly pleaded illness. Fields were not only tilled and planted but also diligently harvested. Colonists traded with the surrounding Indian nation and learned to plant maize, squash and pumpkin and to rotate these crops from year to year. The harvest was bountiful, and new colonists immigrated to the thriving settlement.
2. Why the Pilgrims Abandoned Common Ownership for Private Property by Larry Reed:
The first few years of the settlement were fraught with hardship and hunger. Four centuries later, they also provide us with one of history’s most decisive verdicts on the critical importance of private property. We should never forget that the Plymouth colony was headed straight for oblivion under a communal, socialist plan but saved itself when it embraced something very different.
In the diary of the colony’s first governor, William Bradford, we can read about the settlers’ initial arrangement: Land was held in common. Crops were brought to a common storehouse and distributed equally. For two years, every person had to work for everybody else (the community), not for themselves as individuals or families. Did they live happily ever after in this socialist utopia?
Hardly. The “common property” approach killed off about half the settlers. Governor Bradford recorded in his diary that everybody was happy to claim their equal share of production, but production only shrank. Slackers showed up late for work in the fields, and the hard workers resented it. It’s called “human nature.”
The disincentives of the socialist scheme bred impoverishment and conflict until, facing starvation and extinction, Bradford altered the system. He divided common property into private plots, and the new owners could produce what they wanted and then keep or trade it freely.
Communal socialist failure was transformed into private property/capitalist success, something that’s happened so often historically it’s almost monotonous. The “people over profits” mentality produced fewer people until profit—earned as a result of one’s care for his own property and his desire for improvement—saved the people.
3. Thanksgiving – What the pilgrims knew about socialism and private property by John Stossel:
The Pilgrims had clashing ideas about how to organize their settlement in the New World. The resolution of that debate made the first Thanksgiving possible.
The Pilgrims were religious, united by faith and a powerful desire to start anew, away from religious persecution in the Old World. Each member of the community professed a desire to labor together, on behalf of the whole settlement. In other words: socialism. But when they tried that, the Pilgrims almost starved.
Their collective farming — the whole community deciding when and how much to plant, when to harvest, who would do the work — was an inefficient disaster. “By the spring,” Pilgrim leader William Bradford wrote in his diary, “our food stores were used up and people grew weak and thin. Some swelled with hunger… So they began to think how … they might not still thus languish in misery.”
His answer: divide the commune into parcels and assign each Pilgrim family its own property. As Bradford put it, they “set corn every man for his own particular. … Assigned every family a parcel of land.”
The Pilgrims’ simple change to private ownership, wrote Bradford, “made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been.” Soon they had so much plenty that they could share food with the natives.
4. Happy Thanksgiving! video below by John Stossel, who explains that before we eat that turkey tomorrow, we should first thank private property rights because they protect us from the “tragedgy of the commons” that resulted in starvation and death for the early Pilgrims’ failed experiment with Bernie Sanders-style socialism! Without property rights, Thanksgiving Day would instead be “Starvation Day.”
5. Related: In my article “Why Socialism Failed: A 2018 Update,” I explain why socialism always fails, whether it’s 400 years ago in the Plymouth colony that led to starvation, misery, and death or today in Venezuela where it is also leading to starvation, misery, and death. Here’s my conclusion and a photo below of my essay that was just published in pamphlet form by the Young America’s Foundation.
Socialism is being repackaged and recycled by today’s left-leaning politicians including Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez and is being taken seriously by a new young and gullible generation, many who weren’t even alive when the historic events of the 1980s and 1990s occurred including the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. But the lessons from history about the defects, deficiencies, and failures of socialism are very clear. As we’ve learned from countless examples throughout history, including now Venezuela, the main difference between capitalism and socialism is this: Capitalism works.
The post Thanksgiving lessons about the failures of socialism and the success of private property and capitalism appeared first on American Enterprise Institute – AEI.