Word
Gems
What is a
man but the sum of his thoughts?
Economics:
William
Bradford & Capitalism
- excerpt from Rush Limbaugh's See, I told You So!
On August
1, 1620, the Mayflower set sail. It
carried a total of 102 passengers, including forty Pilgrims led by William Bradford... But
this was no pleasure cruise, friends. The journey to the New World was a long and arduous one. And when the Pilgrims
landed in New England in November, they found, according to Bradford's detailed journal, a cold, barren, desolate
wilderness. There were no friends to greet them, he wrote. There were no houses to shelter
them... And the sacrifice they had made for freedom was
just beginning.
During the first winter, half the Pilgrims –
including Bradford's own wife – died of either starvation,
sickness or exposure. When spring finally came, Indians taught the settlers how to plant
corn, fish for cod and skin beavers for coats. Life improved for the Pilgrims, but they
did not yet prosper!
This is important to understand because this is where modern American history lessons
often end. Thanksgiving is actually explained in some textbooks as a holiday for which the
Pilgrims gave thanks to the Indians for saving their lives, rather than as a devout
expression of gratitude grounded in the tradition of both the Old and New Testaments.
Here is the part that has been omitted:
The original contract the Pilgrims
had entered into with their merchant-sponsors in London called for everything they produced to go into a
common store, and each member of the community was entitled to one common share. All of
the land they cleared and the houses they built belong to the community as well.
Bradford, who had become the new governor
of the colony, recognized that this form of collectivism was as costly and destructive to
the Pilgrims as that first harsh winter, which had taken so many lives. He decided to take
bold action. Bradford assigned a plot of land to each family to work and
manage, thus turning loose the power of the marketplace.
That's right. Long before Karl Marx was even born, the Pilgrims had discovered and
experimented with what could only be described as socialism. And what happened? It didn't
work! Surprise, surprise, huh? What Bradford and his community found was that the most
creative and industrious people had no incentive to work any harder than anyone else,
unless they could utilize the power of personal motivation! ...
But while most of the rest of the world has been
experimenting with socialism for well over a hundred years – trying to refine it,
perfect it, and re-invent it – the Pilgrims decided early on to scrap it
permanently... What Bradford wrote about this social experiment should be in
every schoolchild's history lesson. If it were, we might prevent much needless suffering
in the future.
"The experience that we had in this common course and condition, tried sundry
years...that by taking away property, and bringing community into a common wealth, would
make them happy and flourishing – as if they were wiser than God," Bradford
wrote. "For this community [so far as it was] was found to breed much confusion and
discontent, and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort. For young men that were most able and fit for labor
and service did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other
men's wives and children without any recompense...that was thought injustice."
Do you hear what he was saying, ladies and gentlemen? The Pilgrims found that people could
not be expected to do their best work without incentive. So what did Bradford's community try next? They unharnessed the power of
good old free enterprise by invoking the undergirding capitalistic principle of private
property. Every family was assigned its own plot of land to work and permitted to market
its own crops and products.
And what was the result?
"This had
very good success," wrote Bradford,
"for it made all hands industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise
would have been."
Bradford doesn't sound like much of a Clintonite, does he? Is
it possible that supply-side economics could have existed before the 1980s? Yes. Read the
story of Joseph and Pharaoh in Genesis 41. Following Joseph's suggestion (Gen 41:34),
Pharaoh reduced the tax on Egyptians to 20% during the "seven years of plenty"
and the "Earth brought forth in heaps." (Gen. 41:47)
In no time, the Pilgrims found they had
more food than they could eat themselves. So they set up trading posts and exchanged goods
with the Indians. The profits allowed them to pay off their debts to the merchants in London. And
the success and prosperity of the Plymouth settlement attracted more Europeans and began what
came to be known as the "Great Puritan Migration."
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