House of Eratosthenes

The Pilgrims at Plymouth Colony organized their farm economy along communal lines. The goal was to share the work and produce equally.

That’s why they nearly all starved.

When people can get the same return with less effort, most people make less effort. Plymouth settlers faked illness rather than working the common property. Some even stole, despite their Puritan convictions. Total production was too meager to support the population, and famine resulted. This went on for two years.

“So as it well appeared that famine must still ensue the next year also, if not some way prevented,” wrote Gov. William Bradford in his diary. The colonists, he said, “began to think how they might raise as much corn as they could, and obtain a better crop than they had done, that they might not still thus languish in misery. At length after much debate of things, (I) (with the advice of the chiefest among them) gave way that they should set corn every man for his own particular, and in that regard trust to themselves. And so assigned to every family a parcel of land.”

In other words, the people of Plymouth moved from socialism to private farming. The results were dramatic.

“This had very good success,” Bradford wrote, “for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been. By this time harvest was come, and instead of famine, now God gave them plenty, and the face of things was changed, to the rejoicing of the hearts of many.”

Andrew Sullivan is upset about this.

Thank God the famously capitalistic Native Americans were there to share with the pilgrims bounty from their private plots of land, tilled as if by the invisible hand itself.

He hasn’t much else to say, just complaining about people saying stuff, with a sarcastic sign-off. We could call it a “debunking” but we would have to re-define what it means to debunk something. The irony is, Andrew Sullivan is illustrating how a collectivist-oriented ideology warps one’s thinking into a prerational shape: You are to be persuaded to reject an idea, with the revelation that one or several among your peers happens to dislike it.

I’m all done researching this, as I’ve already looked into the details in two or three Thanksgivings past. Stossel’s recital of them (to the best I can recall) are accurate. And you don’t need to look into history to ascertain that people work better and harder when they personally enjoy the fruits of victory and bear the burdens of failure. Pretty obvious, really.

Speaking of word definitions, I was thinking of creating a “Sully” as a noun to describe someone who likes to put contentious ideas out on the Internet where they can be seen by as many people as possible…including ideas in the spirit of “that guy is wrong and me and all my friends are right, take my word for it”…and refuses to allow comments under such screeds.

Happy Thanksgiving, everybody. I’ll have the holiday post up as soon as I upload the pre-dawn TurBaconDuckEn cooking photos.

Update: Reason.tv has looked into it as well, and put together this video which makes me contente:

Hat tip to Instapundit.

From Merriam – Webster:

Definition of SULLY
transitive verb
: to make soiled or tarnished : defile

Sounds like it fits.
- Jason | 11/25/2010 @ 15:12
I read about this once before – the first Pilgrim agricultural setup, that is. To take all the farm goods, put them in one pot, and redistribute them equally regardless of input – could only be called collectivist agriculture, or more simply, communism. This system not only removes the incentive to work harder and produce more, but it also eliminates any incentive to innovate and find ways to produce more WITHOUT working harder! Agricultural technology has come a LONG way since the Pilgrim days, but the innovation didn’t come from countries that had collectivized their farming industry!

Rush Limbaugh discussed this particular episode of our history in one of his books, the ones he wrote back in the early 90s. He said that in our time, while most of the rest of the world has been “tinkering with socialism for well over 100 years, trying to perfect it, re-define it, and re-invent it,” the Pilgrims scrapped it early on. Rush pointed out that the Plymouth Rock colony figured this out “more than a century before Karl Marx was even born.”

The only thing that strikes me is why the upcoming failure wasn’t obvious to Governor Bradford from the get-go…or worse, why some people today still think that a collectivist system like this will work wonders if only the right people are put in charge. Or why some refuse to accept that socialism and communism haven’t worked anywhere they’ve been tried, simply because they run directly counter to an immutable, unchanging human nature.
- cylarz | 11/25/2010 @ 22:18
People today still think a collectivist system will work wonders, because any piece of “inconvenient truth” that says something contrary is “debunked” as an “urban legend.” I think the two liberals who run http://www.snopes.com started something bad here (although by accident). Go ahead and follow the links to Sullivan…and his source…there, at Comment #5, you see something interesting:

It would be one thing to suggest that there were additional reasons for the failure of the early colonies. But I’m not sure it should count as right-wing revisionism to make points that Bradford himself explicitly made.

There’s really no “not sure” about it. Liberals are quick to use words and phrases like “revisionism,” “re-writing history,” “myth,” “rumor,” “debunk.” All too often, as is the case here, when you take the time to look into who said what you find the leftist is simply using these incendiary terms to say (as I pointed out) “I don’t like this.” For them, it feels natural, they’re just following through — lifetimes spent feeling their way around problems instead of thinking their way through them.
- mkfreeberg | 11/25/2010 @ 22:45
I’ve used Snopes.com numerous times in the past to “debunk” these urban legends that people sometimes send to me via e-mail. You know, the famous “Bill Gates is giving away his fortune!” chain letters and the like.

Now that you mention it, I have noticed that when Snopes “debunks” something, the conclusion at which it arrives never seems to be favorable to what would possibly be called the conservative view, and never unfavorable to what could possibly be called the liberal one. It suspiciously reminds me of the mainstream media networks – never seems to say anything embarrassing to the Left.

Now, it leaves me wondering. Is there a less-liberal alternative to Snopes that you’re aware of?
- cylarz | 11/26/2010 @ 12:14
Our own brains. After the relevant facts have beem gathered. My critique against Snopes is that they like the opinion-forming business better than the fact-gathering business, sometimes. They’re only well-suited for gathering facts…and I sometimes get the feeling they aren’t gathering them all.
- mkfreeberg | 11/26/2010 @ 13:13

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Lost Thanksgiving LessonThursday, November 25th, 2010

Lost Thanksgiving Lesson
Thursday, November 25th, 2010