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Home – Socialism News – Colonial America Already Ran the Socialist Experiment. It Failed.

Colonial America Already Ran the Socialist Experiment. It Failed.

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani told ABC’s Jonathan Karl last month that a democratic socialist can win any office in the country. He may be right about the contemporary politics, but he is dead wrong about the underlying economics, and Colonial America proved it four centuries before he took the oath of office.

The issue stems from a fundamental question: What makes people act in someone else’s interest instead of their own? The answer, every time, is incentive. Tie a person’s effort to their reward and they produce. Sever that link and they stop trying, no matter how godly or how disciplined the group is. The Pilgrims proved that before they proved anything else about religious liberty, and they proved it the hard way.

Plymouth Colony launched in 1620 under a communal labor arrangement forced on the settlers by their London investors. Everyone worked the common fields. Everyone drew from the common store, regardless of how much they had contributed to it.

Gov. William Bradford, who lived through it and buried half the colony after that first brutal winter, later wrote that the “common course and condition” bred “much confusion and discontent and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort.”

Young, able-bodied men resented working for other families without any personal payoff. Wives ordered to cook and clean for households outside their own considered it something close to servitude. Bradford, a devout man who had every reason to want communal Christian charity to succeed, concluded that the arrangement did not fail because the colonists were wicked. It failed because it asked fallen human beings to behave like angels, and none qualified.

Jamestown ran the same experiment 13 years earlier with........

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