REPEATING HISTORY

 [Based on Forged In Faith, by Rod Cragg]

In reviewing American history, I'm surprised to see that questions relevant in our country in 2021, were also relevant in the early 1600's.  Both Jamestown and Plymouth initially practiced a system known as 'Common-Store'.  This simply meant that all the supplies were brought into one place and were disseminated to all equally without regard for the level of investment made by individuals.  

Although this worked fairly well in the beginning, and may even have been necessary while carving out a community in a wilderness environment, both settlements found that it inculcated laziness and a sense of entitlement among the early settlements.  

Cragg reports regarding the first settlement, Jamestown:

Most were former city dwellers untrained in farming, hunting, and other survival skills.  They had managed to survive an early Indian attack, but most were soon struck down by fatal diseases.  They had built their settlement on low, swampy land...and dysentery, scurvy, and malaria killed scores of them.  So did starvation, which was encouraged by indolence and attitude.  The Old World artisans and gentry among them refused to do the hard work that was necessary for survival - clearing trees, uprooting stumps, planting, weeding, construction.  Even so, a socialistic form of government - the common store system - entitled everyone to equal rations from a common storehouse regardless of how much they worked.  Amid constant squabbling and demoralizing dissension, the colonists began starving to death.   When they had consumed all their livestock, they turned to dogs, cats, rats, and mice.  Eventually, some reportedly turned to cannibalism.  Almost two-thirds of them died.  [p.18]

 Finally, Captain Smith, a professional soldier and explorer, saved the colony by obtaining food from neighboring Indians - and by enforcing a compulsory work program based on a New Testament admonition:  "if any would not work, neither should he eat."  Discarding the common-store system, Smith insisted that settlers had to work in order to draw rations.  [p.19]

William Bradford (first governor of Plymouth) reported that some colonists liked the common-store system and believed "that taking away of property, and bringing community into a common wealth, would make them happy and flourishing."  Instead, it bred "confusion & discontent, and retarded much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort," according to Bradford.  "God in his wisdom," he concluded, "saw another course fitter for them."  

The "fitter" course was the same biblical principle that Captain John Smith had adopted at Jamestown - "if any does not work, neither should he eat."  Bradford replaced the common-store with the free enterprise system, which allowed the private ownership of land.  "This had very good success," he would later report, "for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corne (sic) was planted then other waise (sic) would have bene (sic) by any means the Government or any other could use..."  This was more than a mere shift in economic policy:  it was a faith-based decision to trust God and embrace individual initiative rather than looking to the government as provider.  [p.16]

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” as stated in former Harvard philosophy teacher, George Santayana's work, The Life of Reason: Reason in Common Sense.