I have been reading Nathaniel Philbrick’s wonderful book Mayflower. Philbrick tells the story of the Pilgrims and their journey from England to Holland to America in detail I have never read prior. He tells the tale of the Pilgrims first years in North America; years of starvation, suffering and death. For at least three years, the Pilgrims suffered and died from a lack of food. Then something changed. In 1623, William Bradford, the governor of Plymouth, made a change in the way the colony operated. Philbrick explains on page 165 of Mayflower.

The fall of 1623 marked the end of Plymouth`s debilitating food shortages. For the last two planting seasons, the Pilgrims had grown crops communally—the approach first used at Jamestown and other English settlements. But as the disastrous harvest of the previous fall had shown, something drastic needed to be done to increase the annual yield.

In April, Bradford had decided that each household should be assigned its own plot to cultivate, with the understanding that each family kept whatever it grew. The change in attitude was stunning. Families were now willing to work much harder than they had ever worked before. In previous years, the men had tended the fields while the women tended the children at home, “The women now went willingly into the field,” Bradford wrote, “and took their little ones with them to set corn.” The Pilgrims had stumbled on the power of capitalism. Although the fortunes of the colony still teetered precariously in the years ahead, the inhabitants never again starved.

Bradford discovered that when people are allowed to work in their own self interest and keep the fruits of their own industry, all members of the community benefit. Sharing wealth communally without rewarding hard work or punishing sloth universally promotes sloth. This is as true today as it was then.

In 1776 Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations said, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our necessities but of their advantages.” Smith thus explains that we all benefit from the industry of those who provide us goods and services even as they promote their own self interest.

Later in the same book, Smith said, “Every individual…generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.” This is the lesson Bradford learned and lived. Pilgrim families worked harder when they worked in their self interest than they did when the product of their labor was directed to the community storehouse. When given the opportunity, they worked harder and, without even being aware of it, promoted the overall welfare of the entire community.

How many times must this lesson be relearned? How many thousands of times must communal enterprises fail before we finally accept that they always fail? How many times much we watch the invisible hand of self interest benefit entire populations before we finally accept that directed self interest promotes the general welfare better than any other system?

The election of Barack Obama is the call to, once again, try public policies that have failed over and over and over.  Obama’s socialist policies are designed to punish industry and promote sloth. His tax plan is a direct transfer of wealth from the productive to the non productive.

At first, when a Pilgrim worked hard and was successful, the fruits of his labor was shared with those who chose to work less. Working less, did not result in suffering because the lazy worker benefited from the industrious. Thus the incentive for any to work hard and be industrious was low. Obama is proposing a national version of the same failed policy. By punishing success and rewarding sloth, Obama is promoting the policies of the starving years at Plymouth.

Albert Einstien is quoted as saying “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Obama is calling to, once again, implement the failed policies of socialism as if the results will differ from the thousands of times they have been tried and failed in the past. The only real change Barack Obama is offering is a change back to policies that ignore human nature and have failed every single time they have been tried. They will fail for Obama too.

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