No Thanksgiving for Collectivism

By Andrew Stuttaford

Saturday, November 30, 2024

 

Alex Tabarrok revives a Thanksgiving post from 2004 on some handy lessons to be learned from initial blunders made by the Pilgrims when they arrived in North America.

 

Tabarrok:

 

It’s one of the ironies of American history that when the Pilgrims first arrived at Plymouth rock they promptly set about creating a communist society. Of course, they were soon starving to death.

 

That the Pilgrims (or some of them) thought that this was the way to go is not too much of a surprise. Extreme egalitarianism ran through certain strands of Protestantism in post-Reformation Europe, as manifested most notoriously in the Anabaptist takeover of Münster nearly a century before the Mayflower set off on its voyage. In his book on the rise, fall, and (oh dear) rise again of communism (which I reviewed for the magazine here), Sean McMeekin highlighted the story of that 16^th century German “New Jerusalem.”

 

As I noted:

 

Millenarian Münster (which was declared to be the New Jerusalem) hung on between 1534 and 1535 . . . was an early example of radical egalitarian rule in practice, a clear warning of totalitarian nightmares to come and so extreme that it is better regarded as a preview of Maoism than of Bolshevism.

 

England in the early 17^th century was a land in which political, social, and religious dissent were fusing in an increasingly dangerous manner, stirred up by the arrogance, high-handedness, and incompetence of the country’s first two Stuart kings (James I, a clever man, was known as “the wisest fool in Christendom;” his son, Charles I, was for the most part just a fool). The Pilgrim’s “corn collectivism” reflected both the traditions of the radical Reformation and growing intellectual turmoil in England at that time.

 

Fortunately, Governor William Bradford ended this misguided experiment, delivering what Tabarrok rightly refers to as “one of the most insightful statements of political economy ever penned”:

 

[Ending corn collectivism] had very good success, for it made all 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.

 

To borrow Elon Musk’s phrase, collectivism is a “mind virus,” indeed one of the most persistent examples of one that there is (Bradford gives Plato and “other ancients” as examples of those who succumbed to it). Kudos to the governor for noting the presence of the dread word “community” lurking amid the justifications for corn collectivism. The idea “that the taking away of property and bringing in community into a commonwealth would make [people] happy and flourishing” was, he argued, a foolish and vain conceit.

 

This community (“so far as it was,” jeers Bradford) bred “much confusion and discontent” and shattered productivity.

 

Tabarrok:

 

Among Bradford’s many insights it’s amazing that he saw so clearly how collectivism failed not only as an economic system but that even among godly men “it did at least much diminish and take off the mutual respects that should be preserved amongst them.” And it shocks me to my core when he writes that to make the collectivist system work would have required “great tyranny and oppression.” Can you imagine how much pain the twentieth century could have avoided if Bradford’s insights been more widely recognized?

 

Indeed.

 

The problem, however (and this partially explains the survival of the collectivist mind virus over the millennia) is that for some the fact that making such a system “work” would require “great tyranny and oppression” was an obvious job opportunity.