[December 21, 2017] For most of us over the age of 50, we were taught in grade school about the difficulties the Pilgrim Fathers experienced in their first year in the New World. Their adopted rules, an experiment of sorts, were supportive of communal property and cultivating the land in common. The result was an immense failure because of a simple human psychological propensity; self-interest ultimately reinforces laziness.
William Bradford, Governor of the Plymouth Colony, reports that, at the time, he and his advisors considered “how they might raise as much corn as they could, and obtain a better crop than they had done, that they might not still thus languish in misery.”1 After much debate, they chose to abandon the rules of communal property and revert to each man having his own parcel.
One of the foremost authorities on the history of republics, Professor Paul Rahe of Hillsdale College, points to the Pilgrims as an example of how we today can better understand how socialism thwarts hard work and innovation while discouraging what should otherwise be a productive and fruitful society. He is clear that a focus on self-interest discourages those traits necessary for survival in a modern world.
Professor Rahe, in his book Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift (2009), points out that the social experimentation of the Pilgrims can teach us much; how the Pilgrims initially adopted a self-interest centered philosophy that nearly destroyed their colony. He quotes again William Bradford who wrote that after every family had a parcel of land, it made for “all hands very industrious” and “much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been.”
In his observations, Professor Rahe notes that the “taking away of property and bringing in community into a commonwealth would make them happy and flourishing.” In practice, the first socialist experiment was found to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort.
“We’ve had our own modern-day fling with great society welfare state policies. And after trillions and trillions [of dollars] spent we’ve purchased neither more personal industry or frugality. Rather, if people can obtain for free what other men endeavor to labor for, the former learns to keep the latter busy.” – Michele Bachmann,1 American politician
The moral is perfectly clear, self-interest cannot be expunged but when systems are in place that reinforces it, disaster strikes. Just think of the country of Venezuela that has the largest oil reserves in the world yet its socialist economy is in a state of collapse (see my comments on it here, here, and here). Socialism brings out the worse in people by magnifying their self-interest to the detriment of everyone.
[Don’t forget to “Like” the Leader Maker on our Facebook Page.]
———————-