Thanksgiving, Socialism, and Free Enterprise | International Liberty

Thanksgiving, Socialism, and Free Enterprise | International Liberty
Thanksgiving, Socialism, and Free Enterprise

"...But capitalism had to be learned. 

One of the first European settlements in North America, the Plymouth Plantation in Massachusetts, was based on socialism.

And it was real socialism, with common ownership of the means of production.

Unsurprisingly, it was not a rousing success. 

Indeed, it was a miserable failure.

Here’s Larry Reed’s analysis of what happened.

We should never forget that the Plymouth colony was headed straight for oblivion under a communal, socialist plan… 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. …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… Communal socialist failure was transformed into private property/capitalist success, something that’s happened so often historically it’s almost monotonous.

And here are some excerpts from a column that Professor Ben Powell wrote back in 2004..."
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