PROPERTY RIGHTS ARE A PROVEN
his Thanksgiving, as you celebrate the meal the Pilgrims ate with Indians, pause a moment to thank private property. RECIPE FOR PROSPERITY T
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property, or as Bradford put it, “set corn every man for his own particular. ... Assigned every family a parcel of land.” That simple change brought the Pilgrims so much plenty that they could share food with Indians. Bradford wrote that it “made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been.” We see this principle at work all around us today. America is prosperous because private property is mostly respected, and people work hard to protect what they own. China rose out of poverty only when the Communist rulers finally allowed people to own property and keep profits from it. But wait, you say, didn’t the Native Americans live communally? Isn’t that proof that socialism and collective property work? No. It’s a myth that the Native Americans had no property rules. They had property — and European settlers should have treated those rules with respect. Native American property rules varied. There wasn’t much point trying to establish private property in rocky hinterlands where no one traveled. But, writes Terry Anderson of the Property and Environment Research Center, “Private garden plots were common in the East, as were large community fields
I know that seems weird, but before that first Thanksgiving, the Pilgrims nearly starved to death because they didn’t respect private property. When they first arrived in Massachusetts, they acted like Bernie Sanders wants us to act. They farmed “collectively.” Pilgrims said, “We’ll grow food together and divide the harvest equally.” Bad idea. Economists call this the “tragedy of the commons.” When everyone works “together,” some people don’t work very hard. Likewise, when the crops were ready to eat, some grabbed extra food — sometimes picking corn at night, before it was fully ready. Teenagers were especially lazy and likely to steal the commune’s crops. Pilgrims almost starved. Governor Bradford wrote in his diary, “So they began to think how they might raise as much corn as they could ... that they might not still thus languish in misery.” His answer: He divided the commune into parcels and assigned each Pilgrim his own
American Consequences
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