Free Republic

That's right, the Pilgrims who came to America on the Mayflower were debt slaves. The London Company, which financed the trip and the establishment of the Plymouth Colony, was a publicly owned business that insisted that the Pilgrims live and work in a communal or collectivist group, under the guise of lowering costs and speeding up repayment. Unfortunately, then as now, socialist/collectivist endeavors don't work out very well. That's because when it's "All for One and One For All," society breaks down and everyone winds up broke and starving. In the 1600's, economic thought was not very well developed and...

Our modern Thanksgiving celebration and, in fact, the very prosperity that engenders it, are a testament to the difficult lessons those beleaguered Pilgrims learned. Today, we peddle sanitized, cartoonish versions of Thanksgiving to our children as we focus on feasts and football, Christmas purchases and parades. We may be genuinely thankful for the fruits before us, but do we really understand the labors that produced them? As we look around an impoverished globe, we should ask ourselves what exactly it was that those prior generations did that made America the most prosperous nation in history. What lessons can we learn...

Those who still think that it's a good idea for government to "spread the wealth around" must think they're "wiser than God." That's what Plymouth Governor William Bradford concluded nearly 400 years ago after one of America's first socialist experiments led not to shared wealth, but pooled poverty. The Pilgrims, whom we remember at Thanksgiving, started life in the New World with a system of common ownership forced on them by Plymouth colony investors. That quasi-socialist arrangement proved disastrous, and had to be scrapped for one which gave these first Americans the right to keep the fruits of their labor...