Thanksgiving Thoughts: Pilgrims Were Forced to Be Socialists By a Group of Wealthy English Investors!

That's a bit of info I picked up on the Thanksgiving Day this year.

I was going to re-post the last year's Thanksgiving Day post, about how the Pilgrims finally ditched "socialism" and embraced capitalism, to the benefit of all. The article cited in that post, "Great Thanksgiving Hoax", was from Ludwig von Mises Institute, and was written by Richard J. Maybury in 1985.

And no, Ms. Kate Zernike of New York Times, it is not the tea party propaganda. But she seems to like to reduce everything down to a right-wing propaganda or left-wing propaganda, a very cynical approach befitting certain Gen-Xer writers. (For more about her, here's what Andrew Breitbart had to say about her back in February this year.)

The Pilgrims became "socialists" not by choice but under the contract with big investors.

From Politizoid:

You might be surprised to know that the Pilgrims attempted to implement socialism. Of all the people in the world, it should have worked with them. They were a small, close-knit community united by a common religious and philosophical foundation as evidence by the Mayflower Compact, and yet their “communal service” experiment failed as all forms of socialism have done throughout history.

To be fair to the Pilgrims, it was not exactly their plan. Funded by a group of investors, they were contractually obligated to follow their benefactors’ blueprint for the settlement which included holding all things in common and sharing equally in the proceeds of their labor.

William Bradford, the second governor of the Plymouth Colony, describes this economic plan as a complete disaster in his History of the Plymouth Settlement. All produce was taken into a common storehouse where food rations were based on what people truly needed. At the same time, everyone was expected to work hard.

One minor problem, there was no motivation to work.

... The harvest of 1621 produced enough food to host the first Thanksgiving, but food soon became scare again. The 1622 harvest was even more disappointing, and starvation became the norm.

After three years of failure, they were forced to abandon their investors’ communal plan. It was a matter of life and death. There simply was not enough food to survive. The colony leaders finally decided to assign each family a plot of land and allowed every man to plant corn for his own household. ...

And America never looked back. Soon, the harvest was so plentiful that they started to export. No one went hungry.

Here's the link to my 2009 Thanksgiving post.

Happy Thanksgiving, and please remember never to follow, ever, the direction given by the big business or the big government. The pilgrims tried to adhere to their contractual obligations almost to their ruin and death. They finally realized enough was enough, and ditched the contract. Don't believe people in power who claim to know what's good for the rest of us.

(Hmmm. It sounds familiar... Underwater homeowners trying to keep paying the mortgages to the banks who ripped them off by inflating the property value and snared them with loose underwriting and then allegedly sold the mortgages to tax-shelter trusts to issue mortgage-backed securities to dupe investors like pension funds, although more evidence has begun to surface that these mortgage-backed securities have no mortgages that back them, because the banks didn't actually transferred the mortgages to the trust. The homeowners act like a responsible citizen who feels bound by the contract, while the banks have no problem ignoring the contract. When will be the "enough is enough" moment? Ever?)

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