Image credit: en.wikipedia.org
Re-posted
from earlier Cleveland Tea Party blogs:
What Thanksgiving really means To Americans
A couple of years ago, Jerry Bowyer, writing in Forbes
Magazine, recounted the real significance of Thanksgiving, a significance
that is too often lost among the turkey dinners, football games, and stories
about Indians who befriended the early settlers.
In 1620, the Plymouth pilgrims based their original community on
Plato’s Republic, a collective model that appealed to their
religious convictions and morality. But the communal model didn’t work for
them. After over two years of failing harvests and resulting malnutrition,
disease, starvation, and deaths, the pilgrims replaced the communal model with
a model based on private property. The ensuing harvest was abundant, with
surpluses available for trade.
Their Thanksgiving celebrated the triumph of the individual,
private property, and incentive, over collectivism. At first, the pilgrims felt
guilty because they were putting self-interest over the seeming altruism of
socialism. Yet the devout survivors had learned two lessons: 1) that a
theoretical and Utopian collective society fails, and (2) in real life, private
property and capitalism produce prosperity. For them, God, not Plato, knew
best. Accepting the principles of private property and self-interest was God’s
way of harnessing self-interest to the greater good. We know all of this
because an elder of the Plymouth plantation, William Bradford, kept a journal
and it survives today. Mr. Bowyer’s earlier article, with additional historical
background, is here.)
It’s wrong to say
that American was founded by capitalists. In fact, America was founded by
socialists who had the humility to learn from their initial mistakes and
embrace freedom. One of the earliest and arguably most historically significant
North American colonies was Plymouth Colony, founded in 1620 in what is now
known as Plymouth, Massachusetts. As I’ve outlined in greater detail here
before (Lessons From a Capitalist Thanksgiving), the
original colony had written into its charter a system of communal property and
labor.
As William Bradford
recorded in his Of Plymouth Plantation, a people who had formerly been
known for their virtue and hard work became lazy and unproductive. Resources
were squandered, vegetables were allowed to rot on the ground and mass
starvation was the result. And where there is starvation, there is
plague.
After 2 1/2 years,
the leaders of the colony decided to abandon their socialist mandate and create
a system which honored private property. The colony survived and thrived and
the abundance which resulted was what was celebrated at that iconic
Thanksgiving feast.
As my friend Reuven
Brenner has taught me, history is a series of experiments: The
Human Gamble. Some gambles work and are adopted by history and some do not and
should be abandoned by it. The problem is that the human gamble only works if
there is a record of experimental outcomes and if decision makers consult that
record. For many years, the story of the first failed commune of Plymouth Bay
was part of the collective memory of American students. But Progressive
Education found that story unhelpful and it has fallen into obscurity, which
explains why (as I alluded to before) a well-educated establishment figure like
Jared Bernstein would be unaware of it.
I’m often asked why
our current leadership class forgets the lessons of the past so often. They
are, after all, very smart men and women. Don’t they know that collectivism
will fail?
No, they don’t. Not
anymore. For much of our history, our leaders were educated in the principles
which were to help them avoid errors once they have joined the ruling class.
They studied to learn how to not misuse power. Now our leaders learn nothing of
the dangers of abusing power: their education is entirely geared to its
acquisition. All of their neurons are trained on that one objective – to
get to the top. What they do when they get there is a matter for later. And
what happens to the country when they’re done with their experiments is beside
the point: after all, their experiments will not really affect them personally.
History is the story of the limitations of human power. But the limits of power
is a topic for people who doubt themselves and their right to rule, not the
self-anointed.
That’s how it is
now, and that’s how it was in 1620. The charter of the Plymouth Colony
reflected the most up-to-date economic, philosophical and religious thinking of
the early 17th century. Plato was in vogue then, and Plato believed in central
planning by intellectuals in the context of communal property, centralized
state education, state centralized cultural offerings and communal family
structure. For Plato, it literally did take a village to raise a child. This
collectivist impulse reflected itself in various heretical offshoots of
Protestant Christianity with names like The True Levelers, and the Diggers,
mass movements of people who believed that property and income distinctions
should be eliminated, that the wealthy should have their property expropriated
and given to what we now call the 99%. This kind of thinking was rife in the
1600s and is perhaps why the Pilgrim settlers settled for a charter which did
not create a private property system.
But the Pilgrims
learned and prospered. And what they learned, we have forgotten and we
fade. Now, new waves of ignorant masses flood into parks and public
squares. New Platonists demand control of other people’s property. New True
Levelers legally occupy the prestige pulpits of our nation, secular and sacred.
And now, as then, the productive class of our now gigantic,
colony-turned-superpower, learn and teach again, the painful lessons of
history. Collectivism violates the iron laws of human nature. It has always
failed. It is always failing, and it will always fail. I thank God that it is
failing now. Providence is teaching us once again.
Happy Thanksgiving!
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