[A]s you enjoy the holiday feast tomorrow, remember that only private property makes prosperity possible – a hard lesson the original Pilgrims learning in the years after their arrival in North America. […] Once they landed in 1620, the Plymouth colony, following the advice of the company, declared all pastures and product in common and enshrined this principle in law. The result was economic chaos, disease and starvation. After the first winder, half the colonists had died. It was 1623 before private property rights were established in land, and each stockholder was allowed to cultivate food at a profit.Textbooks typically blame the weather for this disaster. But William Bradford, governor of the colony, who instituted the New World’s first privatization, had a different opinion. Faced with a crisis, he wrote in his diary, the colonists ‘began to think how much 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.’ So Bradford ‘assigned to every family a parcel of land.’ ‘This had very good success for it made all the hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been by any means the Governor or any other could use, and saved him a great deal of trouble, and gave far better content.’The previous socialist policy, Bradford wrote, had proved the ‘vanity of that conceit of Plato’s … that the taking away of property and bringing community into a commonwealth would make them happy and flourishing.’ In fact, socialism ‘was found to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort.’It was Bradford’s decision to draw clear lines of ownership, far more than a turn in the weather or better production techniques, that allowed for the first plentiful harvest and give us the first Thanksgiving. Robert A. Sirico
Wall Street Journal, Nov 26, 1997 (Wednesday before Thanksgiving)