Report: Thanksgiving happened only after Pilgrims abandoned socialism
Foundation looks at lesson for America today
By WND StaffPublished November 28, 2019 at 4:33pm
The Pilgrims, of course, were the first to celebrate Thanksgiving, even though the name, the holiday designation, the traditions, parades and football games were unseen in the far distant future at the time.
But they only could celebrate after they abandoned socialism – the socio-political-economic system that many of the Democrats running for their party's nomination for president in 2020 now espouse.
It's according to a report from the Foundation for Economic Education.
The "first few years of the settlement [after the 1620 landing of the Mayflower and the founding of the Plymouth colony) were fraught with hardship and hunger," FEE reported.
But the history of the nation provides a reason to "never forget that the Plymouth colony was headed straight for oblivion under a communal, socialist plan," FEE reported.
It "saved itself" by abandoning those concepts and moving to "something very different," the report said.
"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?" wrote FEE.
"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.'"
Facing "conflict," Bradford eventually had to make a change.
"He divided common property into private plots, and the new owners could produce what they wanted and then keep or trade it freely," the report said.
"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."
The report, by Lawrence W. Reed, Humphreys Family Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education, explained socialism "has crash-landed into lamentable bits and pieces too many times to keep count—no matter what shade of it you pick:
central planning, welfare statism, or government ownership of the means of production."
The aftermath uses logic, he said.
"Then some measure of free markets and private property turned the wreckage into progress.
I know of no instance in history when the reverse was true—that is, when free markets and private property produced a disaster that was cured by socialism. None."
He cited Germany after World War II, Hong Kong after Japanese occupation, New Zealand in the 1980s, Scandinavia in recent years and more.
"Two hundred years after the Pilgrims, the Scottish cotton magnate Robert Owen thought he’d give socialism another spin, this time in New Harmony, Indiana.
There he established a community he hoped would transcend such 'evils' as individualism and self-interest.
Everybody would be economically equal in an altruistic, fairy-tale society.
It collapsed utterly within just two years," he explained.
He wrote, "Consider this as you feast at the Thanksgiving table this week:
The people who raised the turkey didn’t do so because they wanted to help you out.
The others who grew the cranberries and the yams didn’t go to the trouble and expense out of some altruistic impulse or because of some nebulous 'sharing' fantasy.
Sacrificial rituals, even if they make you feel good, rarely bake a bigger pie.
Charity is laudable, and I engage in it, too, but it’s not an engine of production or prosperity.
For that, you need profit, incentive, and private property.
"When God instilled a measure of peaceful, productive self-interest into the human mind, he knew what he was doing."
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