Thursday, if you eat a nice meal, thank the Pilgrims. They made Thanksgiving possible.
They left the Old World to escape religious persecution. They imagined a new society where everyone worked together and shared everything.
In other words, they dreamed of socialism. Socialism then almost killed them.
As I explain in my weekly video, the Pilgrims attempted collective farming. The whole community decided when and how much to plant, when to harvest and who would do the work.
Gov. William Bradford wrote in his diary that he thought that taking away property and bringing it into a commonwealth would make the Pilgrims “happy and flourishing.”
It didn’t. Soon, there wasn’t enough food. “No supply was heard of,” wrote Bradford, “neither knew they when they might expect any.”
The problem, Bradford realized, was that no one wanted to work. Everyone relied on others to do the work. Some people pretended to be injured. Others stole food.
The communal system, Bradford wrote, “was found to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment.”
Young men complained they had to “spend their time and strength to work for other men’s wives and children without any recompense.”
Strong men thought it was an “injustice” they had to do more than weaker men, without more compensation.
Older men thought that working as much as young men was “indignity and disrespect.”
Women who cooked and cleaned “deemed it a kind of slavery.”
The Pilgrims had run into the “tragedy of the commons.” No individual Pilgrim owned crops they grew, so no individual had much incentive to work.
Bradford’s solution: private property.
He assigned every family a parcel of land so they could grow their own corn. “It made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been,” he wrote.
People who had claimed that “weakness and inability” made them unable to work now were eager to work. “Women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn,” wrote Bradford.
The Pilgrims learned an important lesson about private property.
Unfortunately, people keep repeating the Pilgrims’ mistakes.
Socialism is more popular than capitalism among college students. Many want everything shared, including their student loan debt.
President Joe Biden wants to give them that by forgiving some of their student debt.
Of course, then the debt would become a common, to be repaid by all taxpayers.
That would punish people who had long ago paid off their debt.
It would punish people who studied, worked hard, got jobs and were working to pay off college loans.
It would people who went to trade school or no school at all.
It would punish poor people because student loans are mostly held by the relatively rich.
Government granted student loans already create bad incentives:
People who don’t like or benefit from college are encouraged to take out loans they can’t afford and go to expensive colleges anyway.
Colleges increase their tuition, knowing that government will pay what students don’t.
Forgiving student debt would make all that worse.
Fortunately, Biden’s student loan forgiveness program ran up against legal challenges. I hope it’s dead.
Students should learn from the Pilgrims: take responsibility for your own debt, work hard to pay it off, and don’t expect the public to fund your bad decisions.
Bottom line: In a common, everybody takes as much as they can. That creates shortages.
Private property creates prosperity.
Every Thanksgiving, I’m thankful for that.
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…and NOW you know WHY he wants to kill 7.2 Billion people. That’s the percentage of people on Earth who like pies.
Pedo Pete can suck my dick, as tiny as it may be.
??
A fag with self esteem problems. How pedestrian. Amirite?
Socialism = starvation
Meanwhile Europe laughs at us. I have a coworker from Europe who spent €600 a year on college.
Europeans are heavily taxed to subsidize your coworker’s college. There’s no free lunch.
Ask that coworker — or, better still, his neighbors and fellow countrymen — just what their income tax rates are to support such a socialist paradise …
Because they simply just don’t want to work at all or they have an overinflated sense of what they are worth. A person flipping burgers at McDonals shouldn’t be paid as much as skilled jobs like a software engineer or physicist for example.
Not sure what mental illness has taken the country by storm, but the younger generations truly believe socialism will allow them to do nothing while the government magically gives them a living wage (although no one can define living wage). Of course if you show them countless examples of how communism only provides purges, suffering and poverty they just wave it aside and claim that history is just someones opinion.
Colleges are busy creating a useless class of people who have to pay folks in the construction and service industry, (me) lots of money because they can’t do anything for themselves. Go Colleges!
if they were useless, they wouldn’t be able to pay you
How much do you make off your gender studies degree…now that Twitter fired you?
Dad?!? Is that you? /s
The Pilgrims fled religious persecution…my, how we have evolved in the 21st century/sarc
Actually, by today’s standards, they brought that religious tyranny with them. Well that and the Socialism. If it weren’t for savages, they’d have all died that first winter.
Yesterday I had a 0900 appointment with a 3D printer. As I pulled into the lot, ten minutes early, I saw a guy, not emaciated, definitely soft, locking the door to the place I was going. I watched him head east as I parked, takeout coffee in his left, head down & eyes glued to the cell in his right, around the corner of the building & out of sight. Maybe he was going to his car for something, I thought. He never came back. I looked through the glass door: a partial drum kit, stacked concentric-vertically batter head to batter head like a wedding cake, a large speaker, a ratty 12-string in a corner leaning against a keyboard. Accoutrements to the flake. And the printer was visible, in a corner, filthy-grimy.
Got back to the casa, which is where the phone is, plugged into the wall, & called another 3D. Apologies, she said, but our website is out of date – we sold the 3D part of the business. Here’s the buyers email, I don’t have a phone number.
Called a third. I think that’s the last one in the local deck. He wanted me to text pics to his cell. I don’t cell. Or text. That was ok. He was out & about, not at the shop, would call me later & I could bring the piece to be reproduced for him to measure/quote. He never called back.
But last night I made cornbread. And a big pot of supersauce.
I didn’t grow the corn, but I paid them for it that did, which added the golden D-link me to that S-chain. The sauce, trysting overnight, will be perfect. Cornbread is a little dry.
Learning a cornbread iteration that doesn’t work is success, a la Edison (even if he was a pirate who said it cuz it sounded sweller), if you do it different next go.
I’ma Pilgrim. But not a learned-reformed socialist. That’d obviously never light a bulb or bake a cornbread, even a dry one.
Tragedy of the commons is the commons & how common it is. The “you will own nothing & you will be happy” refrain is on immortal ouroborus loop.
They may be 3D printing that junk nowadays.
I’m thankful I ain’t that. Them fowl is turnkey turkeys.
I always paid my way, and even more important is I always worked my way. I went from a poor child in Chicago, there was about a dozen of us in a two bedroom apartment, to a fairly prosperous person with his own bought and paid for home, in Anchorage, AK, through hard work, diligence, and a sense of personal responsibility. I was also able to retire at 55. Take that you commie and commie lovers, and many blessings to all who love personal responsibility and Freedom. Even though I have wonderful family that still live in Chicago, the best thing I ever did was get out of that democratic shithole of Chicago.
Oh, really?
As far as I know, the Indians didn’t have private property. So, why didn’t the starve??
Yes. But if you hunted in their area, no matter if you were white or another Indian group, they shot you. So, they did have ownership.
That’s GROUP ownership. Not individual ownership. Big difference.
If I may…Indian Givers could not exist without the concept of personal property. So unless you want to dispute the reality of the Indian Giver, I’d say the case is pretty much closed.
/s
They had personal property. They did not have a concept of owning land, i.e. real estate, except when it came to dealings with other tribes — then they definitely DID have a concept of owning land and would fight to the death over it.
Don’t believe everything written by leftists who hate white people, claim everything bad is result of colonialism, despise individual rights, espouse Marxism, demonize Christianity, and then claim that ALL “native Americans” (hey, is that what they called themselves before Europeans arrived? just curious) were peaceful, living at one with nature, never taking more than they needed, and never engaging in war, slavery, theft, rape or any other bad thing EVERRR.
IOW, stop shit-stirring with the “noble savage” b.s. on Thanksgiving.
Your absolutely right. The culture did have a deep sense of ownership. Commanche moon is an awesome book. Horses were definitely privately owned.
They starved in the winter when the corn didn’t come in that year. You can’t eat just lean wild meat, you’ll eventually get meat poisoning like Lewis and Clark. They had no written word, life expectancy 32 yrs, didn’t invent beer, made crude tools of sticks and stone like monkeys, sat around and told heap big stories while the women worked to the bone to keep them fed and warm, chewing hide to make soft moccasins for them to wear. If it wasn’t for the women, they’d a starved. They even sent a young girl with a baby out in a mid-winter blizzard to lead Lewis and Clark to the west coast, too lazy to get out of the wigwam to do it themselves. They didn’t invent a damn thing in 13,000 years.
Broadly speaking — just who, other than Whites and Arabs and (dot) Indians and Chinese/Japanese, ever invented much of anything?
Beyond that, what great music and books and architecture and art have existed outside of those 4 peoples? And what great philosophical/spiritual systems of thought have become important other than those of those 4 peoples?
How big was the largest tribal group in any one area? Maybe a couple thousand folks who moved from place to place, season to season — chasing the food without ever really growing any?
That sort of paradise might work with large tracts of land with plentiful game and for modestly sized groups of people — it wouldn’t work in these United States today with our 345,000,000 (including probably 40,000,000 illegal aliens) …
I hear this conard every Thanksgiving and it is not only very simplistic, but not true. They put everything into common stores not because they were socialist, but because that was what the corporate charter that was thrust upon them at the last moment, as well a bunch of less than salt of the earth types that were not puritans, called for, that they had to pay back to the people who financed the venture. There was as well mishaps that caused them to not be as prepared as they should have been, such as one of the ships not being seaworthy at the start, and rampant diseases when they got there. If it wasn’t for their charitable christian nature in the service of their fellow man, they would have not likely made it at all.
Is thrusting corporate chartering like mask mandating & vax-‘suggesting’ ?
Pretty much just different orifices.