All schoolchildren are taught that the pilgrims had a hard time surviving at Plymouth, but managed to pull through and survive. What they are rarely taught is that the pilgrims made their initial life in the new world unnecessarily difficult. They invented agricultural socialism and tried to live by it.
The pilgrims were supposed to till community farm lands and put the fruits of their labor in a common store house. Everyone was then supposed to be fed from the common storehouse. Nobody had a plot of farm-able land to call his own and no one had any food stuffs that they could call their own other than what was doled out to them.
A funny thing happened on the way to the farmland: Not very many people decided to show up and those who did were not very energetic.One observer of this situation noted that despite the hunger and lack of food healthy young men were seen in non productive pastimes such as pitching pennies instead of working the fields.
Here is where the “miracle of the pilgrims” occurred. They recognized the real problem and did something about it! They responded by giving people ownership of their farmland and made them responsible for feeding themselves. The results were swift and astounding. More food was produced than anyone thought possible. As a result of this the pilgrims had a thanksgiving they could really celebrate.
In recent history people have been practicing socialized farming with the same results that the pilgrims had the first years of their entry onto the new world. The Soviet Union and the Soviet Block countries practiced collective farming with disastrous results. Today, many third world countries practice socialized farming with the usual disastrous results. In fact wherever you see serious hunger you can bet that socialized farming is behind it.
It is hard not to be overcome with cynicism when watching “do good” people trying to put a guilt trip on Americans because we are not starving while others are. Very few of these “do good” people have any inkling of what the problem is and many of them are taking actions which are useless or even make the problems worse.
What made the pilgrim’s experience so unique was that it took them only a short few years to realize that the communism they had invented didn’t work and then they quit trying to make it work.
The Russians tried for 70 long years to make communism work under the Soviet way of life with a total lack of success. Today, people are teaching at Ivey League universities who don’t realize communism doesn’t work. Most scary of all we had people running for the highest office in the land who didn’t realize that communism doesn’t work and plan to try to make it work in parts of our economy.
As Americans, we can all be thankful for the pilgrims, since we all benefit from their experience.