One thing to be thankful for this Thanksgiving is that it took the Pilgrims only a year or so to figure out that socialism was bad, both for individuals and communities as a whole.
Four centuries ago, William Bradford, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, stated flatly in his history of Plymouth that the Pilgrims had been wrong to think the “taking away of property and commonwealth would make them happy and flourishing, as if they were wiser than God.”
According to Bradford, not long after the Pilgrims landed in 1620, they found that the collectivity they had instituted in the colony bred “confusion and discontent and retard[ed] much employment” because men did not want to work without pay for other men’s families. And so, a little more than a year after the first Thanksgiving, they decided to divide up the land they had so that everybody had a share and could grow what they wanted. Productivity increased, and the colony began to prosper, attracting more and more immigrants and ushering in the great migration from England, which soon resulted in such prosperity that New England became a wealth center for Great Britain.
