Last week, my wife, Karen, and I were in Massachusetts providing an American History trip to our seventh grandchild. We were gratified to learn that she knew more about the country’s beginning than almost all of the previous six travelers to New England with us.
We begin with a tour of the Mayflower II and the Plimoth-Patuxet Plantation where 102 English landed and first lived from the autumn of 1620. Descendants of the Wampanoag native tribes serve to educate visitors about the lives of the first Americans in that region.
From there we spend time on the Freedom Trail and note the site of the so-called Massachusetts Massacre, Paul Revere’s home, and the Old North Church from which the lanterns signaled. For the last day we take the route of the British soldiers from Cambridge to the Lexington Green where the first colonials died, on to Concord where the British hoped to seize the contents of the colonial armory. Spoiler alert: they failed after the locals stopped them at the Concord River Bridge.
There are many worthy sayings about history. Mark Twain is attributed with this one: History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes. The point of my column today is best worded from George Santayana who wrote: Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
We find ourselves today in a seemingly perilous national state of our younger generations being ignorant of economic and human nature lessons from the past. Hopefully the polls are wrong (as they have been more often lately), but with candidates espousing socialism in major races for Congress, we may learn firsthand the joys of defending general principles of freedom we have long taken for granted.
When the Pilgrims were looking for investors to pay for their trip to the new world, they finally received the funding from an investment group headed by Thomas Weston of London. There were over 50 individuals participating.
Even though seeming to be capitalistic, the syndicate required the emigrants to agree to accumulate wealth communally, common wealth, until the investors were to be repaid at the end of 7 years. The businessmen were concerned they would not be able to collect from individual families. (You should read the details in How Private Property Saved the Pilgrims by Tom Bethell found in the Hoover Digest of January 30, 1999.)
The Pilgrims were unwilling to work hard only to produce goods to ship back to England. They felt a sense of slavery and injustice, according to William Bradford, the Governor of the group, in his report. The industrious were forced to subsidize the slackers. This situation existed in 1621 and 1622 when Bradford, the duly elected leader, divided up the food plots according to the families of those who remained. About half of the original 101 died within the first year of living in this land of plenty!
This changeover to private property brought very good success according to Bradford. The system worked because of individual incentive. If a family did not work for its own benefit, it would starve to death.
How can our children and grandchildren not know this principle? Get busy and tell the story around your table at Thanksgiving. I am going to order Tom Bethell’s book, The Noblest Triumph: Property and Prosperity Through the Ages, St. Martin’s Press, Inc.