Guest Post by John Stossel
Happy Thanksgiving!
But beware the “tragedy of the commons.” It almost killed off the pilgrims.
Now, via Washington, D.C., it’s probably coming for us.
Tragedy of the commons is a concept from an essay by ecologist Garrett Hardin. He wrote how cattle ranchers sharing a common parcel of land soon destroy that land. That’s because each rancher has an incentive to put cattle on the common. Soon, the extra animals eat all the grass. Shared grazing space is destroyed because no rancher has an incentive to conserve.
If the ranchers put up a few fences and divide the land, each rancher has an incentive to limit grazing. That saves the grass and the cattle.
Sharing things and “public” property sound nice, but only private ownership reliably inspires people to conserve and protect.
No one washes a rental car.
I bring this up now because the Democrats’ new multitrillion-dollar spending bills are all about expanding the commons: more free highways, free health care, free day care, free money for parents, housing subsidies, tax credits for electric vehicles, etc.
All these handouts discourage responsibility by making it easier to take from the “commons.”
Save for retirement? Why? The government will cover it. Save up for college? Why? Government will give you grants and loans and then forgive those loans.
I bring this up now because this same sort of thinking nearly killed the pilgrims.
When they came to America, the pilgrims decided to share everything. The governor of Plymouth Colony, William Bradford, wrote that the pilgrims thought “taking away of property and (making it communal) … would make them happy and flourishing.”
Food and supplies were distributed based on need. Pilgrims would not selfishly produce food for themselves.
In other words, they, like Sen. Bernie Sanders and many American young people today, fell in love with the idea of socialism.
The result was ugly. When the first harvest came, there wasn’t nearly enough food. Many pilgrims died that winter. If the Wampanoag American Indians hadn’t helped them, all might have starved.
It was the tragedy of the commons. No individual pilgrim owned crops they grew, so no one had an incentive to work harder to produce extra to sell to others. Since even slackers got food from the communal supply, they had no incentive to work hard.
Many didn’t.
Strong men thought it was an “injustice” that they “had no more in division of victuals and clothes than he that was weak and not able to do a quarter the other could.” Women had to cook and clean for other women’s husbands, and they “deemed it a kind of slavery.”
The shared farming, Bradford concluded, “was found to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit.”
When the Pilgrims ran out of food, they “began to think how they might raise as much corn as they could, and obtain a better crop … that they might not still thus languish in misery.”
Their solution was private property. They split up the collective farm and gave every family a plot of land.
That was a big success. “It made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been,” wrote Bradford. “The women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn.” Before, they “would allege weakness and inability.”
Thanks to individual plots of land, food shortages turned into a surplus that became the feast we now call Thanksgiving.
“All men have this corruption,” Bradford observed. In a common, everyone wants to take as much as they can.
Private property created prosperity.
This Thanksgiving, I’m thankful for private property.
It’s why I can eat turkey.
It is my sincere desire to provide readers of this site with the best unbiased information available, and a forum where it can be discussed openly, as our Founders intended. But it is not easy nor inexpensive to do so, especially when those who wish to prevent us from making the truth known, attack us without mercy on all fronts on a daily basis. So each time you visit the site, I would ask that you consider the value that you receive and have received from The Burning Platform and the community of which you are a vital part. I can't do it all alone, and I need your help and support to keep it alive. Please consider contributing an amount commensurate to the value that you receive from this site and community, or even by becoming a sustaining supporter through periodic contributions. [Burning Platform LLC - PO Box 1520 Kulpsville, PA 19443] or Paypal
-----------------------------------------------------
To donate via Stripe, click here.
-----------------------------------------------------
Use promo code ILMF2, and save up to 66% on all MyPillow purchases. (The Burning Platform benefits when you use this promo code.)
Amen and Amen.
Mending Wall
By Robert Frost
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
‘Stay where you are until our backs are turned!’
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
‘Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.’ I could say ‘Elves’ to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’
(Boundaries are important for many reasons, but especially to humans who covet.)
All basic decency is based on Marbury’s laws. Do what you have agreed to do, and do not encroach upon others or their property. If you can remember these two things you are on the way to spiritual enlightenment.
If anyone was unwilling to work, neither should that one eat.
2 Thess 3:10
America could us a giant dose of this verse.