Thread: The story of thanks giving!

Originally Posted by JMS

On August 1, 1620, the Mayflower set sail. It carried a total of 102 passengers, including forty Pilgrims led by William Bradford. On the journey, Bradford set up an agreement, a contract, that established just and equal laws for all members of the new community, irrespective of their religious beliefs. Where did the revolutionary ideas expressed in the Mayflower Compact come from? From the Bible.

The Pilgrims were a people completely steeped in the lessons of the Old and New Testaments. They looked to the ancient Israelites for their example. And, because of the biblical precedents set forth in Scripture, they never doubted that their experiment would work.

There is a whole lot more in the bible that talks about how to deal with worshipers of false Gods and other things. They just picked the things that made sense to them, and they supposedly picked the right ones. But their laws don't follow from the bible automatically. Escpecially if they also looked at the OT
Scripture also brought forth the dark ages and religious genocide.

The outcome depends on the pick.

Originally Posted by JMS

Here is the part that has been omitted: The original contract the Pilgrims had entered into with their merchant-sponsors in London called for everything they produced to go into a common store, and each member of the community was entitled to one common share. All of the land they cleared and the houses they built belong to the community as well.

Bradford, who had become the new governor of the colony, recognized that this form of collectivism was as costly and destructive to the Pilgrims as that first harsh winter, which had taken so many lives. He decided to take bold action. Bradford assigned a plot of land to each family to work and manage, thus turning loose the power of the marketplace.

That's right. Long before Karl Marx was even born, the Pilgrims had discovered and experimented with what could only be described as socialism. And what happened? It didn't work! Surprise, surprise, huh? What Bradford and his community found was that the most creative and industrious people had no incentive to work any harder than anyone else, unless they could utilize the power of personal motivation!

That would be communism, not socialism.

Originally Posted by JMS

But while most of the rest of the world has been experimenting with socialism for well over a hundred years – trying to refine it, perfect it, and re-invent it – the Pilgrims decided early on to scrap it permanently. What Bradford wrote about this social experiment should be in every schoolchild's history lesson If it were, we might prevent much needless suffering in the future.

Pure socialism is just as bad as pure capitalism. People left unchecked will ruin the game for everybody.
Making bipolar statements about socialism is as much uncalled for as making bipolar statements about any other political structure.

A good working system makes compromises and ends up somewhere in the middle.
There are god principles in socialism and there are good principles in capitalism.

Originally Posted by JMS

And the success and prosperity of the Plymouth settlement attracted more Europeans and began what came to be known as the "Great Puritan Migration."

But they also became greedy, used capitalism to cheat the natives, then took over the country and committed mass murder on those natives that didn't agree.
So before you hold that model of society up as a beacon for all to come to, you have to realise that in the end, that one didn't work out either. Well, it did for some, but not for all.