Skip to main content

Thankful for Real Community: A Thanksgiving Lesson

What follows is a true story – actually, two true stories, or the same story that occurred in two different places in very different times and circumstances. Read on to find out where.

They had been discussing amongst themselves in pairs and small groups for months, concerned with their poverty and lack of progress in improving crop yields, so important to feeding themselves and building a thriving community. What they’d been doing, it seemed, should have succeeded. They all worked the same fields together – clearing, tilling, sowing, weeding, and reaping – everyone in the same fields at the same time. Anyone who might be weak in one skill should have had that weakness made up by others working beside them, with everyone benefitting from everyone else’s unique abilities.

They all had a common purpose. But for the occasional troublemaker, present in every community, they liked each other, helped each other, and took care of each other when some among them fell ill. And, everybody got an equal share of the yearly harvest, accounting for family size. But something was amiss. Their harvests were meager, more meager than the farmers knew they should be.

So they were finally all together, in the same room, discussing the problem and deliberating what to do about it. They all agreed it was not a problem of bad soil. Their problem was not a lack of knowledge or a lack of skill. With accusations flying back and forth, they realized that none of them was truly working as hard as he was capable of doing. But why?

Because they got the same share of the yearly output regardless of their personal effort. It was easy to let others do the work and still get a share, but since everybody saw it the same way, nobody was working to their full capabilities.

The solution was simple. They’d divide the fields and work their own plots individually, keeping the gains for themselves.

The next year, the harvest was bountiful, the best, in fact, they’d ever seen. And since most had produced more than they could eat, everybody had more because of trade.
_________________
This story has likely played out many times in many settings for ages, but one instance is especially relevant for Thanksgiving because it involved the Pilgrims, that community of religious zealots who wanted to separate from the Church of England and who founded Plymouth Colony. For three years, they practiced a form of extreme socialism where all work was shared, including household chores where women were assigned to cook communally and wash other families’ clothes. William Bradford, the colony’s repeatedly re-elected governor, described this briefly in his history, based on his diary. He relates no detail concerning their deliberations before they decided to move away from socialism and to free enterprise except to say that,

“after much debate, the Governor, with the advice of the chief among them, allowed each man to plant corn for his own household… So every family was assigned a parcel of land… This was very successful. It made all hands very industrious, so that much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been… The women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to plant corn, while before they would allege weakness and inability; and to have compelled them would have been thought great tyranny and oppression.”

Bradford continued:

“The failure of the experiment of communal service, which was tried for several years, and by good and honest men proves the emptiness of the theory of Plato and other ancients, applauded by some of later times, — that the taking away of private property, and the possession of it in community, by a commonwealth, would make a state happy and flourishing; as if they were wiser than God. For in this instance, community of property (so far as it went) was found to breed much confusion and discontent, and retard much employment which would have been to the general benefit and comfort.”

A year later, Bradford went on describe their circumstances after moving to a free enterprise system:

“But before I come to other things I must say a word about their planting this year. They felt the benefit of their last year’s harvest; for by planting corn on their own account they managed, with a great deal of patience, to overcome famine… The settlers now began to consider corn more precious than silver; and those that had some to spare began to trade with the others for small things, by the quart, pottle, and peck, etc.; for they had not money, and if they had, corn was preferred to it.”
_____________
A continent and an ocean away, 355 years later, the same story played out in a little village in China called Xiaogang. The same communal service, at least in farming, was practiced, imposed by China’s authoritarian Communist Party rather than by idealism. The same meager harvests were suffered. The farmers grumbled and debated for years in the same way. And they knew they were capable of so much more. So one day, after the farmers met and decided to divide the land and farm individually, they wrote a contract.

Unlike the Pilgrims, who were self-governing, Xiaogang’s farmers had to be concerned about what would happen if the Communist government found out they were not farming collectively. So the contract had to be made and signed in secret. Among its agreed provisions was a promise that if any of their number were arrested for rejecting communal farming, the others would raise the arrested man’s children.

The farmers of Xiaogang worked very hard, with renewed enthusiasm, secretly competing with each other to produce the largest yields. When Xiaogang’s harvest broke records for how plentiful it was, Communist authorities knew something was amiss and investigated. But as it happened, Mao Zedong was dead. Deng Xiaoping was in power, and when the contract came to light, instead of being punished, the farmers were held up as an example of a new way for China to proceed. Today, that contract is held in reverence.
____________
These two stories, 355 years and thousands of miles apart, teach us that all humans respond to incentives and are self-interested. Thus, giving everyone equal shares as a way to guarantee security actually results in poverty and insecurity. As William Bradford put it, rather than socialism, “God in His wisdom saw that another plan of life was fitter for them.”

Byron Schlomach is Director of the 1889 Institute and can be reached at bschlomach@1889institute.org.

The opinions expressed in this blog are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the official position of 1889 Institute.


*Bradford quotes are from: Bradford, William, Bradford’s History of the Plymouth Settlement; 1608-1650, rendered into modern English by Harold Paget and published in 1909, originally titled Of Plymouth Plantation, reprint by Mantle Ministries: San Antonio, TX, 1988, pp. 115-116, 141-142. For the story of Xiaogang, listen to NPR’s “The Secret Document That Transformed China.”

Popular posts from this blog

1889 Institute's Statement Regarding School Closures

The 1889 Institute, an Oklahoma think tank, has released the following statement regarding Joy Hofmeister’s proposal to keep schools closed for the remainder of the school year. We at the 1889 Institute consider Joy Hofmeister’s proposal to close Oklahoma’s schools for the rest of the school year a gross overreaction to the coronavirus situation. Even in the best of times and circumstances, suddenly shifting every student in the state from traditional classrooms to online distance learning will have negative educational consequences. This in addition to the economic burden on two-earner families forced to completely reorder their lives with schools closed. We believe many of our leaders have overreacted to worst-case scenarios presented by well-intended health experts with no training or sense of proportion in weighing the collateral damage of shutting down our economy versus targeting resources to protect the truly vulnerable. We say reopen the schools and stop the madness. ...

Can Government Force You to Close Your Business?

1889 Institute takes no position on whether any or all of these measures are warranted or necessary, or whether their economic fallout would inflict more human suffering than they prevent. We are simply evaluating whether they are legal.   With the unprecedented (in the last 100 years at least) reaction surrounding the outbreak of Covid-19, questions that few living legal scholars have considered are suddenly relevant.   Can a quarantine be ordered?   Can a mass quarantine, lockdown, or “cordon sanitaire” be ordered? Can businesses be ordered to change their behavior?   Can businesses be ordered to close? Can state governments order these measures? Can local governments order these measures? My legal brief addresses these issues from a statutory point of view; it is clear that state law gives the governor and mayors broad authority in a state of emergency. They must, of course, do so in a neutral way that they reasonably believe will help preve...

COVID-19 Exposes TSET’s Uselessness: Let’s Get Rid of It

After more than a month of COVID-19 house arrest , Oklahoma is reopening. However, the government-created economic disaster that shutdown orders have caused will be studied by epidemiologists, economists, and other social scientists for decades to come. In the meantime, we have to deal with the consequences as they occur, everything from a lack of toilet paper on store shelves (hopefully, that’s over) and hair that’s grown too long to what will undoubtedly be a host of bankruptcies. In the meantime, there is a timely question that truly ought to be answered in Oklahoma. Where has TSET (Tobacco Settlement Endowment Trust) been in this time of crisis? Recall that TSET was created as a quasi-independent government by constitutional amendment as part of the 46-state tobacco settlement wherein tobacco companies agreed to pay states as reimbursement for the Medicaid costs of treating tobacco users for tobacco-induced illnesses. Instead of using the money to reduce taxes for Oklahom...

Will the United States Supreme Court Stand Up For Lawyers’ First Amendment Rights?

To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves, is sinful and tyrannical. Oklahoma law requires attorneys to join and pay dues to the Oklahoma Bar Association in order to practice their occupation. The folly of this this requirement lies not just in the financial burden imposed on lawyers, but in its affront to their First Amendment rights. This is because the Oklahoma Bar Association (OBA) routinely uses the money it receives in mandatory dues payments to support political causes. As a result, attorneys are forced to subsidize political activity and opinions they may disagree with. Over the Christmas holiday I filed an amicus (“friend of the court”) brief urging the United States Supreme Court to weigh in. You can read my brief here . The case in question involves a North Dakota attorney, Arnold Fleck, who sued North Dakota’s mandatory bar association for using his mandatory dues to engage in the same type of activity th...