“By the spring,” Pilgrim leader William Bradford wrote in his diary, “our food stores were used up and people grew weak and thin. Some swelled with hunger… So they began to think how … they might not still thus languish in misery.”
(John Stossel – Fox News) Families will argue this Thanksgiving.
Such arguments have a long tradition.
The Pilgrims had clashing ideas about how to organize their settlement in the New World. The resolution of that debate made the first Thanksgiving possible.
The Pilgrims were religious, united by faith and a powerful desire to start anew, away from religious persecution in the Old World. Each member of the community professed a desire to labor together, on behalf of the whole settlement.
In other words: socialism.
But when they tried that, the Pilgrims almost starved.
Their collective farming — the whole community deciding when and how much to plant, when to harvest, who would do the work — was an inefficient disaster.