The Tea Party sees Thanksgiving as a morality tale about finding salvation in Capitalism. The Pilgrims were failed Socialists who turned to Capitalism for survival. Only after foregoing communal ownership of property and allowing private ownership did the colony prosper. (Communism could also have been used, but socialism is the bogey meme du jour.)
The actual historical details are much more interesting than the Tea Party myth.
The Pilgrims formed a start-up and the Merchants and Adventurers of London were their venture capitalists. The Merchants would put up the cash for the supplies and the trip to the New World and the colonists would put up the labor. They signed a seven-year contract in which all land, livestock, lumber, furs, and other trade goods were held in partnership. At the end of the seven year period, the company was to be dissolved and the assets distributed. The Pilgrims were more like shareholders in a corporation than socialists.
Interestingly, only one Pilgrim died on the 66-day voyage. This is attributed to the fact that the Mayflower had never carried passengers, she was a “sweet ship.” Seepage from previous wine cargos had impregnated the ship’s timbers and acted like a disinfectant.
The Mayflower landed in November of 1620 and the first Thanksgiving was held in 1621. The colony’s governor, William Bradford, abolished the communal land arrangement and gave each household a parcel of land, in 1623. It seems unlikely that a colony in the grips of a famine, caused by evils of communal property ownership, would host a three-day feast. The prospects of a famine would come the following year with a devastating summer drought and the seasonal migration of fish and fowl.
Agriculture did become more profitable in following years, in part due to improved cultivation techniques of corn, a crop for which the colonists had no experience, and in part due to the increase in each individual’s exertion on their privately held land.
Two attempts to make payments to the investors were met with pirates, who captured the ships bringing back furs and timber. The investors, fearing a total loss of their investment, settled with the Pilgrims for £1800 after an investment of nearly £7000.
H/T: NY Times, New American, Dictionary of American History.
-David Drumm (Nal)
raff,
That’s a good question. What did Forrest ever do to them?
Hey, Reagan Troll.
I do understand individual rights and in proper context of they are restrained by the the common good and I’ve demonstrated such.
Your intellectual failings to understand that is your failing, not mine.
And since when are propaganda trolls interested in discussion?
Buddha,
I have been checking in a few times today and you really have the anti-Gump people riled up! It is funny how the facts really get under their skin. I do want to know what they have against Forrest Gump. He was a successful businessman, a religious man and a family man. He was more successful than George W. and probably smarter.
I agree
Anthropogenic carbon production changes the state.
The question becomes to what degree or degrees. For this we rely on models to tell us and false study’s from the UN IPCC that were supposedly peer reviewed. Time and time again over the last two years this has been exposed to not be the case, more like lies, deception, and tricks to hide the decline. Let us not forget that one of the principal scientist in the whole climate-gate scandal is on record as saying there has been no statistical warming in the last fifteen years. We still have no definitive answer on who leaked the E-mails but as many documents Wikileaks has released I’m beginning to think it was them.
We now have several top scientist who were proponents of AGW correcting the record and there views on the subject. You have the co-chair of the IPCC telling you this has nothing to do with environmental policy but the redistribution of wealth. The carbon trading, Cap and Trade scheme also was exposed for what it was, a ponzi scheme, hence the closure of the Chicago Climate Exchange, CCX last month. What was fitting was it was Obama who helped start it, Mr Redistribution himself, Gore and Pachaurri. Closing price ? A nickel per ton. A 16 lb bag of charcoal is worth more than a ton of CO2, about 200 times more.
NOTES
Barack Obama was a board member of the Joyce Foundation that funded the fledgling CCX. Professor Richard Sandor, of Northwestern University had started the business with $1.1 million in grants from the Chicago-based Joyce Foundation endorsed by Obama. When founded in November 2000, CCX’s carbon trading market was predicted to grow anywhere between $500 billion and $10 trillion. Fortunately before its collapse Sandor was able to net $98.5 million for his 16.5% stake when CCX was sold.
CCX was sold earlier this year for $600 million to the New York Stock Exchange-listed IntercontinentalExchange (ICE), an electronic futures and derivatives platform based in Atlanta and London. ICE also acquired the European Climate Exchange as part of the transaction. The ECX remains open to accommodate the Kyoto Protocol-required carbon trading among EU nations. The sale of CCX to ICE allowed climateers like Al Gore’s Generation Investment Management and Goldman Sachs to cash out of investments in CCX.
The last sentence should gain your attention.
Okay, Ms. Home Schooled Happy Meal.
If I’m such a dumbass, show us all your dazzling comprehensive knowledge of chemistry, thermodynamics and complex systems.
Oh, that’s right, you are incapable of cogent evidentiary based argument.
Never mind.
As to self-fornication? I’ll let xbox speak for himself, but if you mean masturbation one needs look no further than your ignorant trollery for a fine example of hedonistic self-pleasuring that amounts to nothing.
Gump:
“Locke also knew that regulation was necessary to foster and protect commerce. Where he went wrong was failing to recognize that unregulated markets (as opposed to procedural regulation) leads to the same kind of abuses to equal protection and individual rights as not have procedural regulation.”
How are we going to discuss this when you dont even understand individual rights? Gump you are an obfuscator and totally devoid of any intellectual capacity.
Ekeyra sees it and so does everyone else.
Gump does being ignorant and stupid hurt?
Troll,
As to context? I already told you it is you who lack context – the context that the common good is a counter-balance to individual rights and both Jefferson and Locke knew this. That you are too ideologically blind or simply venal to realize that is your problem. As to the Constitution? What part of Equal Protection as applied to the common good don’t you understand?
Apparently all of it.
The purpose of the Constitution is found in the Preamble:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. General welfare and common good are synonymous terms.
Amendment 14 – Citizenship Rights (Ratified 7/9/1868)
1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
And lest we forget . . .
“He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.” Recognize that, troll? It’s the first listed complaint against King George found in the Declaration of Independence.
You can indeed be deprived of your personal property in furtherance of the mission statement found in the Preamble and in furtherance of the what is necessary for the public good. Just so long as Due Process is applied. You know, Due Process, that thing your boy Bush threw out the window by suspending habeas corpus and that the liar Obama pissed on by saying he can assassinate American citizens without it.
Yet I, the demonstrable egalitarian humanist and Jeffersonian Constitutionalist? I’m the Nazi here?
Nazi is as Nazi does, Forrest.
buddha your ignorance is showing. Global warming is a fucking joke, and you have no concept of free markets. When and where in history has there been a market free of government intervention for you to study so closely and come to your conclusions? and xboxers go fuck yourself for calling me a liar.
Gippers Ghost-
Toto, I don’t think we’re in Dixon, Illinois any more.
Gipper- Is it hot where you are? Does it smell of sulfur?
Gump:
what are civil and human rights? Now you have added another concept without definition.
Hen Man:
It is always morning in America.
Gump:
You need to understand both in context. Locke would mean individual property when he stated property of the people. You cant read a paragraph and then say it comports to your view. You need to understand Locke in his entirety. The property of the people in your lexicon means collective property in Locke’s it is the sum total of property owned by the individual. If you would take the time to read his other writings you would understand that simple concept.
As to Jefferson and his quote, same thing. What do you think our Constitution is? A document to protect the collective or the individual?
Gump you are Marxist/socialist/fascist tool and rather dull at that. I hope not all socialists/Marxists/Fascists are as intellectually vacuous as you.
“not having”
Gippers Ghost-
Is it still “Morning in America”?
Locke also knew that regulation was necessary to foster and protect commerce. Where he went wrong was failing to recognize that unregulated markets (as opposed to procedural regulation) leads to the same kind of abuses to equal protection and individual rights as not have procedural regulation. Free markets are a myth based on the assumption that all actors are good actors, that markets are self-correcting and that market actions by bad actors cannot negatively impact the civil and human rights of others – something Locke himself found undesirable.
Come on, troll.
What’s the matter?
Reality got your tongue?
I don’t have to answer the questions of fascists too stupid to see the self-evident.
“During the contest of opinion through which we have passed the animation of discussions and of exertions has sometimes worn an aspect which might impose on strangers unused to think freely and to speak and to write what they think; but this being now decided by the voice of the nation, announced according to the rules of the Constitution, all will, of course, arrange themselves under the will of the law, and unite in common efforts for the common good. All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.” – Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1801
Seems Jefferson understood balance too.
“. . . whenever the Legislators endeavour to take away, and destroy the Property of the People, or to reduce them to Slavery under Arbitrary Power, they put themselves into a state of War with the People, who are thereupon absolved from any farther Obedience, and are left to the common refuge which God hath provided for all men against force and violence . . .” – John Locke, Second Treatise
Note Locke didn’t say property of the individual.
Seems like they both understood that individual rights stand not in a vacuum but as constrained by the common good.
Stupid is as stupid does, Forrest.
Speaking of stupid, Marxism isn’t the same thing as socialism and the implication they are is a false equivalence.
Try? Try implies besting a fascist apologist requires effort when it does not. But please, foam at the mouth some more. It looks good on you.
Gump:
That was interesting but there was nothing on human rights in there. You still havent answered my question, what are human rights? And you wont, because human rights are collective rights and you know it.
Locke, Jefferson and others understood individual rights, if you dont understand the distinction I cannot help you. The United Nations UDHR was just such a document which subordinated the individual to the collective. Human rights in your lexicon are nothing but collective rights. Dont put Locke and Jefferson anywhere near your ideology.
Try again Gump, that Marxist/Socialist BS has you stuck on stupid.
http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/hum_303/enlightenment.html
By your “definition”, Jefferson was also a Nazi as were the other great thinkers of the Enlightenment. Humanism is a natural response to oppression. If humanism was such a bad idea, then it’s a bad idea shared by the other Founding Fathers who were noted humanists in the tradition of both the English and French Enlightenment like Washington, Paine and Franklin.
I’d rather be known for keeping company with the traditions of Jefferson than an apologist for personal and corporatist greed.
But please, suggest I’m a member of the Hitler youth again.
I need all the laughs I can get.
Just because you think there is no such thing as human rights, jackboot, doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
But intimate I’m a Nazi again. It’s funnier than Hell coming from a fascist tool such as yourself.
Buddha is Laughing:
“The fact you’re too stupid or too greedy to realize that there are such a thing as human rights? Locke and Kant would disagree.”
Are you that god damn stupid Gump? There is no such thing as human rights. There are only individual rights. What are human rights Gump? What is a human right? What does that even mean? I have the right to be human? God damn it Gump follow the ball, you ignorant troll. You don’t even know what you mean half the time and the other half you are insulting people to make yourself feel big and bad. You are a disgrace, if I was a socialist I wouldn’t want you defending my positions. You arent up to the task Gump, you are a moron and depend on Wikipedia and Huffington Post for your opinions.
People don’t like your BS Gump, you are stupid and mean. A very poor combination. You have been educated to a level beyond your ability to comprehend. Maybe Bob Esq can educate you Gump, he seems to understand individual rights.
But Gump, you aint nothing but a slave master wannabe with your line of BS. Keep it up and maybe you can get that Hitler Youth pin yet.
“Individual rights is the only proper principle of human coexistence, because it rests on man’s nature, i.e., the nature and requirements of a conceptual consciousness. Man gains enormous values from dealing with other men; living in a human society is his proper way of life—but only on certain conditions. Man is not a lone wolf and he is not a social animal. He is a contractual animal. He has to plan his life long-range, make his own choices, and deal with other men by voluntary agreement (and he has to be able to rely on their observance of the agreements they entered).”
“A right is the sanction of independent action. A right is that which can be exercised without anyone’s permission.
If you exist only because society permits you to exist—you have no right to your own life. A permission can be revoked at any time.
If, before undertaking some action, you must obtain the permission of society—you are not free, whether such permission is granted to you or not. Only a slave acts on permission. A permission is not a right.”
So Gump, human rights are collective rights and saddle the individual as a master saddles his horse.
You are a simple tool Gump.