The Pilgrims after arriving in Plymouth set up a colony and enacted for the first time a COMMUNAL living arraignment which they soon abandoned because of it’s failure to provide for the needs of the colonists. Instead they replaced the communal concept with that of private property and individual industry and it was from this model that abundance and wealth abounded!
Communism has failed along with socialism because it replaces the individual with a collective and substitutes the wants and desires of the individual with the needs of the collective. There is no incentive to achieve because there is no room for advancement of one’s state. All are equal and all are unhappy!
I am afraid too many have never learned this lesson from history and are doomed to repeat it!
Arriving in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, in November 1620, the Pilgrims brought with them the economic assumptions present within their own religious congregation, which sometimes conflicted with those of hierarchical English society.
Jim Otteson, visiting scholar at the Feulner Institute’s Simon Center for American Studies at Heritage, emphasizes the religious dimension to their social and economic thinking.
“The fact that the Pilgrims wrote an agreement and voluntarily signed it,” Otteson declares, “presupposes that they saw themselves as morally equal. They signed it as peers and equals, and did not ask the king for permission to do so.”
Those religious believers, he says, perceived one another as made in the image of God. That belief created a social equality among their party and established the fertile soil for economic liberty in New England.
Samuel Gregg, visiting scholar at the Simon Center for American Studies, identifies several assumptions that guided the Pilgrims about private property and economic liberty, and influenced the British colonies and later the United States.
Preeminent in the Pilgrims’ economic worldview was the concept of private property. Unlike their Jamestown counterparts in 1607, the community did not undertake the disastrous and utopian approach of collectivization—that is, the idea that their property would be held in common by the entire community.
Instead, the passengers embarked on the understanding that they would have the right to own and develop their property, for their own good and that of the community.
The Mayflower Compact and the Roots of Economic Freedom and Private Property | The Heritage Foundation
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