President
Obama has failed to learn the simple basic lesson that the Pilgrims,
who established the tradition of Thanksgiving Day in 1623 (not 1621, as
often claimed), learned the hard way. The bounteous harvest they were
gratefully celebrating on that day was preceded by years of starvation.
They arrived in mid-December 1620, and half of them died the first
year. Though the Indians helped them survive, the colonists were
chronically short of food, and their numbers continued to dwindle.
Under the Mayflower
Compact, which governed the colony, “all profits and benefits that are
got by trade, working, fishing or any other means” were community
property in the “common stock” of the colony. And “all such persons as
are of this colony are to have their meat, drink, apparel and all
provisions out of this common stock.” People were required to put in
everything they could—they were forbidden from growing their own
food—and to take out only what they needed. It was a policy of “from
each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” centuries
before Karl Marx seduced millions of people with those words.
The communal system
was such a failure that in the spring of 1623 the Pilgrims feared they
would not survive another poor harvest. “So they began to think,” wrote
the colony's governor William Bradford, “how they might raise as much
corn as they could, and obtain a better crop than they had done, that
they might not still thus languish in misery. At length, after much
debate of things, the Governor (with the advice of the chiefest among
them) gave way that they should set corn every man for his own
particular, and in that regard trust to themselves....And so assigned to
every family a parcel of land.....This had very good success; for it
made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted then
otherwise would have been by any other means the Governor or any other
could use, and saved him a great deal of trouble, and gave far better
content.”
Far from making the
people “happy and flourishing,” the communal system, wrote Bradford,
“was found to breed confusion and discontent, and retard much employment
that would have been to their benefit and comfort.” Not
surprisingly,“young men that were able and fit did repine [complain]
that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men's
wives and children, without recompense. The strong, or men of parts,
had no more division of food, clothes, etc. than he that was weak and
not able to do a quarter the other could; this was thought injustice.
The aged and graver men to be ranked and equalized in labor, and food,
clothes, etc. with the meaner and younger sort, thought it some
indignity and disrespect unto them.”
Under the
circumstances, there was little incentive to produce food. Severe
whippings were tried to induce greater production, but they did little
more than increase discontent.
The social
disharmony, along with the food shortages, disappeared once the concept
of private property was introduced and people could keep whatever they
produced, or trade it away as they saw fit. In 1647 Bradford was able
to write “any general want or famine hath not been amongst them since to
this day.” Such was the success of the new system that in 1624 the
colonists began to export corn, trading it for beaver pelts, other furs,
and meat.
In 1624 the Pilgrims
took a further step in property rights. The system of assigning land
“to every man for his own particular” had certainly increased the
production of corn, but the assignment was drawn by lot yearly. Thus
there was not much incentive for making improvements to one's tillage
when someone else might draw that land next year. The men requested of
the Governor “to have some portion of the land given them for
continuance, and not by yearly lot....Which being well considered, their
request was granted.”
Jamestown, the first
permanent English colony in America, established in Virginia in 1607,
had an experience similar to the Pilgrims at Plymouth. Early years of
starvation were followed by converting to a system of property rights
and a free market, which brought abundance. Under collectivism, less
than half of every shipload of settlers survived the first twelve months
at Jamestown. Most of the work was done by only one-fifth of the men,
to whom the socialist system gave the same rations as to the others.
During the winter 1609-10, called “The Starving Time,” the population
fell from 500 to 60.
But when Jamestown
converted to a free market, there was “plenty of food, which every man
by his own industry may easily and doth procure,” wrote the colony
secretary Ralph Hamor in 1614. Under the previous system, he said, “we
reaped not so much corn from the labors of thirty men as three men have
done for themselves now.”
We should not
underestimate the significance of the experiences at Plymouth and
Jamestown. Property rights and free markets were truly revolutionary
and fundamental to capitalism. Without them, all the wealth, progress
and human betterment that followed could not have occurred. According
to Sartell Prentice, “In England, meanwhile, farming 'in common'
continued to be the general practice for another hundred years. Not
until the second decade of the seventeen hundreds did 'setting crops for
their particular' begin to be slowly accepted in England—and decades
were to pass before the new practice became sufficiently widespread to
provide an adequate food supply for the population.”
Even today,
centuries later, there is still inadequate understanding of the
importance of property rights and free markets. A recent BBC poll of
29,000 people worldwide found only 11 percent think free-market
capitalism is a good thing. One-quarter of those polled said capitalism
is “fatally flawed.”
There is no shortage
of people who want a political system that gives them the fruits of
other men's labors, as at Plymouth and Jamestown. And there is an
abundance of politicians willing to accommodate them at the expense of
other men's property. The result is repetition of the collectivist
systems (socialism, fascism) that have failed in the past, and no end to
the discontent and resentment they engender. But people can be seduced
to try them again and again by lofty idealistic statements, eloquent
messages of hope, and promises that can never be kept. All of which
allow the covetousness of other people's property—whether for personal
gain or altruistic, collectivist aims—to masquerade under noble-sounding
phrases.
When Barrack Obama
was campaigning for the presidency, he promised to redistribute other
people's wealth for the collective good. In a short but spirited dialog
with a small businessman, “Joe the plumber,” Obama argued that society
would be better off if Joe's taxes were increased and the money
distributed more widely to those less well off. What is this but a
denial of Joe's property right to his own money and a repetition of the
socialist distribution schemes that were so disastrous at Plymouth and
Jamestown?
Once he was
president, Obama came up with a health plan that would require everyone
to buy health insurance—as though people's money was not theirs by right
but, rather, was part of the “common stock” of community property, to
be allocated by the leader for the collective good! And, just as at
Plymouth, people who did not cooperate would be punished—not by severe
whippings as was done there, but by the more civilized penalty of
seizing their property (money) through fines if they refused to buy
health insurance.
Contrast the
government inflicting pain and penalty to force compliance compared to
the benefit and satisfaction—even happiness—from market transactions,
which people undertake without force or penalty in order to enhance
their lives and are far more effective than socialistic distributions.
Obama said, "We are
fundamentally transforming the United States of America." He was
indeed, wiping out the fundamental principles that allowed America to
prosper.
Obama claimed, "This
is our moment, this is our time to turn the page on the policies of
the past, to offer a new direction." Yes, he was “turning the
page on the policies” of property rights and free markets. But the
direction he was offering was not new but old. It is the ancient system
of four centuries ago, before property rights, those basic rights
which are still denied in varying degrees in many countries that have
never discovered free-market capitalism, much less embraced it—and
whose standard of living reflects that fact. And those countries
comprise a large share of the 89 percent of the world's people who do
not think capitalism is a good thing—but who look with envy on
America's success and demand we redistribute a share of our wealth to
them.
"Generations from now,” Obama said, “we will be
able to look back and tell our children that this was our time."
Yes, and they will be the worse for it—and damn you for it!
(The
above appeared on this blog on Thanksgiving in 2012 and 2010.
Its lesson is as appropriate now as ever.)
