The Starving Pilgrims
Socialism was tried very early in America - and it failed miserably.
In his 24 October 2026 Lew Rockwell article, Why Socialism Always Becomes Totalitarian, L. Reichard White writes:
"From each according to his ability to each according to his need" is the classic operating manual for socialism. In fact the Pilgrims signed on to the Mayflour Compact etc. under ship's papers tbat spelled that out and became Plymouth's Charter.
This is also a pretty close description of what's called altruism...
In his ‘History of Plymouth Plantation,‘ the governor of the colony, William Bradford, reported that the colonists went hungry for years, because they refused to work in the fields. …
This "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" was an early form of socialism, and it is why the Pilgrims were starving. Bradford writes that "young men that are most able and fit for labor and service" complained about being forced to "spend their time and strength to work for other men's wives and children." Also, "the strong, or man of parts, had no more in division of victuals and clothes, than he that was weak." So the young and strong refused to work and the total amount of food produced was never adequate.
Many early groups of colonists set up socialist states, all with the same terrible results. At Jamestown, established in 1607, out of every shipload of settlers that arrived, less than half would survive their first twelve months in America...
The first "Thanksgiving" was not so much a celebration as it was the last meal of condemned men...
The piece of human nature missing from leftist thinking is covered by one word. RECIPROCAL. As in RECIPROCAL Altruism...
With this in mind, the starving Pilgrims situation had a simple fix. In 1623 Bradford abolished socialism. He gave each household a parcel of land and told them they could keep what they produced, or trade it away as they saw fit. In other words, he replaced socialism with a free market based on reciprocal trade and that was the end of famines...
...they were producing ten times as much corn per person after ditching the socialist system, a system which, by its nature, catastrophically ignores reciprocation...
Missing reciprocity, in attempting to make socialism work anyway, even the best intentioned get more and more desperate in trying to force folks to produce "according to their ability" or at all, reciprocity be damned...
The first stop is "communism."...