The Failed Socialist Enterprise That Led To Thanksgiving
(But, almost led to starvation and death.)
Socialism, it's pretty simple to see, is based in irrationality and an utter lack of understanding of human nature. Stossel writes of an example in American history for Real Clear Politics:
The Pilgrims at Plymouth Colony organized their farm economy along communal lines. The goal was to share the work and produce equally.That's why they nearly all starved.
When people can get the same return with less effort, most people make less effort. Plymouth settlers faked illness rather than working the common property. Some even stole, despite their Puritan convictions. Total production was too meager to support the population, and famine resulted. This went on for two years.
After every family was assigned a parcel of land to farm privately, things changed -- dramatically -- for the better. And the first Thanksgiving could be held in November, 1623. Stossel continues:
What Plymouth suffered under communalism was what economists today call the tragedy of the commons. The problem has been known since ancient Greece. As Aristotle noted, "That which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it."If individuals can take from a common pot regardless of how much they put in it, each person has an incentive to be a free-rider, to do as little as possible and take as much as possible because what one fails to take will be taken by someone else. Soon, the pot is empty.
What private property does -- as the Pilgrims discovered -- is connect effort to reward, creating an incentive for people to produce far more. Then, if there's a free market, people will trade their surpluses to others for the things they lack. Mutual exchange for mutual benefit makes the community richer.







Yay. Three yawns for the egotistical, self-aggrandizing, and ever-so-boring Stossel.
Hip-hip YAWN! Hip-hip YAWN! Hip-hip YAWN!
Ever the spinmeister, even Thanksgiving is not safe from Stossel's distortions. John knows it all, you see. Just ask him. He'll tell you.
The operative word being "nearly." Don't you just love it when someone points to a near failure as proof?
For the ignorami on board with Stossel, let's point something out: a near failure is still a success. The Pilgrims succeeded, ladies and gentlemen. That's why we're hear now.
And adding to the idiocy still further, not only is his sample too small to prove his contention, but it's atypical. How do you prove a governing system (which may or may not have been truly a fair representation of what the Pilgrims were doing) is a near-failure (i.e., a marginal success) when your sample concerns extraordinary people in extraordinary circumstances?
How do these extraordinary people, under the stress of colonizing an unsettled land (which they did voluntarily, knowing full well what they were getting into), prove anything about anything?
But then again, Stossel, while intelligent, can't get over himself long enough to realize what an idiot he's being.
Next.
Patrick at November 27, 2010 2:20 AM
Patrick buddy, are all gays commie too?
ron at November 27, 2010 8:29 AM
As I recall the story of thanksgiving, the starving disesed pilgrams had their asses saved by the charity of the indians.
Sorry Patrick but the pilgrims were a sucsess like big auto was - seems bailouts are an american tradition after all
lujlp at November 27, 2010 11:00 AM
Ron, I have no idea. I haven't surveyed all gays for their political persuasion. In fact, I haven't even surveyed one of them. Get busy, if you're that interested.
Patrick at November 27, 2010 1:32 PM
Union Mentality.
Juliana at November 27, 2010 4:32 PM
Luj and Patrick (respectively):
The Indians provided and taught the Pilgrims to plant corn (which was a new crop to the Pilgrims), but the Pilgrims showed the Indians how to plant more corn then they'd ever been able to grow before. It was a mutual sharing of intellectual and experiential capital.
Reading directly from the horse's mouth: Of Plymouth Plantation - the writings of William Bradford (1590-1657), completed in 1647.
http://www.mith2.umd.edu/eada/html/display.php?docs=bradford_history.xml
It's all there in black and white, Patrick. They were starving, stealing, and begging under the conditions provided to them under the socialist economic model. Once they changed to the individualistic capitalist economic model they flourished in abundance. (Happy Thanksgiving!)
William Bradford's writing lends the most credence to the early struggles of the first settlers since it is a direct and personal account of someone who lived through it. You don't have to take Stossel's word for it, but it factually irrefutable that socialism didn't work for the Pilgrims and capitalism did.
Feebie at November 27, 2010 11:48 PM
Re: link above, the section entitled Anno Dom: 1623 (pagination 209)is where he recounts these events - providing factual proof to Stossel's article.
Feebie at November 28, 2010 12:33 AM
Patrick is correct that any one incident should be distrusted when making decisions.
But this is an even worse logical error: "For the ignorami on board with Stossel, let's point something out: a near failure is still a success. The Pilgrims succeeded, ladies and gentlemen. That's why we're hear now.
Post hoc, ergo prompter hoc.
Putting it another way, if I decide to stop consuming ground chicken feet in order to cure a cancer, and instead begin a treatment of surgery and radiation, is my eventual status as a cured cancer patient an example of chicken feet's contribution to curing the cancer? Or was is immaterial, or perhaps even harmful? The fact that a goal is reach after some act does not necessarily tell us the goal was reached *because* of the act. The goal may have been reached despite the act, or the act may have nothing to do with whether the goal was reached.
Spartee at November 28, 2010 5:17 AM
I saw this mentioned on the national news some days ago. More than one expert denied that "socialism" was the national goal - the Pilgrims were there to make an independent living and a profit, plain and simple; they only pooled their resources because they had no choice at the beginning; and they didn't even stop doing that until well AFTER the first Thanksgiving.
lenona at November 28, 2010 11:26 AM
"I saw this mentioned on the national news some days ago."
Can you provide a source here? Pooling resources seems different to me then pooling labor, effort and wealth/crops. Resources pooled could mean anything (voluntary night watches, tools, water well).
Many of the settlers when handed surplus from their crop would trade the surplus for other things they did not have and I would imagine until markets were up and running they were heavily reliant on communal surplus...but that does not guarantee you will get something for nothing.
Feebie at November 28, 2010 2:01 PM
Couple of things Patrick.
First of all, if communistic social orders can work anywhere, it is in small groups with closely interwoven relationships. To borrow the words, (slightly paraphrased) of John Locke, "Where the only enforcer is reputation and the wish to be well thought of" ought to ensure that people work and contribute, and it didn't, that should say something of human nature. It was a near failure because they did not ALL die.
Now you assert that a near failure is still a success, well this is true sometimes, but not this time. And that brings me to the second point I wanted to make. People will rarely cling to failures to the point of extermination by starvation. In short, in this case it is not a "success" because they way they succeeded was by ceasing to do things that didn't work. They specifically changed their system to a less idealized and more realistic modus operendi, and prospered accordingly thereafter.
Were the pilgrims extraordinary? Brave certainly, but courage is not a rare commodity when life is essentially nasty, brutish, and short. Were their circumstances extraordinary? Not even, colonies had sprung up around the world for thousands of years before that one, and the need was not different for them than any other. Provide food, shelter, the basics, and provide for the common defense against potential outside aggression. Granted they did have an unfamiliar environment to deal with, but they didn't have to go completely from scratch, farming was already familiar, they simply needed to adapt to new world methods.
So, what it proves Patrick, is that people inevitably make attempts to avoid failure when they can see it coming a mile away, there is little more obvious in terms of failure, than starvation, its hard to be in denial when your belly is so distended that people way back in london are poking it and saying "what the hell is that?" I exaggerate, but nonetheless, you take my meaning. The communal set up they had tried was indeed a failure, the colony was not, because they changed to something that worked.
Robert at November 28, 2010 2:05 PM
Can you provide a source here?
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All I remember, offhand, was that it was CBS, ABC, or NBC. I don't THINK I saw Stossel - if I did, it was only for 5 seconds - but I did see Rush Limbaugh, briefly. (As you might guess, he was NOT one of the ones who said that socialism was never a long-term goal of the Pilgrims.)
lenona at November 29, 2010 11:36 AM
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