William Bradford, Capitalism, and Thanksgiving

Sponsored by: Patriot Home Funding

In six days, we celebrate Thanksgiving, a uniquely American holiday, where we gather with family and friends, enjoy their company, eat a massive feast together, watch some football, and as the name of the day implies, give thanks for God's fruitful bounty that He has blessed us with.

For me, Thanksgiving is a time of reflection. I reflect on my life and remember lost family members and friends, where I came from,  remember fun times and enjoy great fellowship. It is a great time for all of us to reflect, take stock of who we are, where we are in life, what our goals and dreams are, and ask God for strength and wisdom.  

Another guy who took stock of his situation was William Bradford, who was the governor of the colony of pilgrims that formed around Plymouth Rock starting in 1620.

Survival and food production were the first goals of the pilgrims in that colony, and the pilgrims adopted a policy that they called "farming in common," which means that they farmed the land together and shared the food equally.  The idea sounded good at the time but was a massive failure. Those pilgrims who were more determined and worked harder became angry at those who didn't, and quickly the seeds of resentment and dissention were sowed. In modern times we call that equity, or socialism. New York and Seattle just voted for a modern day version of that.

After three years of dysfunction, bickering, near starvation, and the loss of nearly half the colony, William Bradford was forced to take stock.

Bradford came to the conclusion that the problem was the absence of private property. Bradford wrote in his journal that later became the book titled "Of Plymouth Plantation," that he "assigned to every family a parcel of land, for their present use. This had very good success, for it made all hands very industrious, and much more corn was planted than otherwise would have by any means."  

Bradford wrote that those who favored the communal property approach lied to themselves into thinking that they were, "Wiser than God." He drew up a map and gave each family a plot of land to call its own. Food production increased by a factor of five in the first year. Bradford summed it up by writing, "Each family, attempting to better its standing in the community, increased the hours worked on each plot."

And thus, 150 years before Adam Smith wrote "The Wealth of Nations," William Bradford demonstrated that the foundation of America, would be, and will always be, individual incentive, hard work, and the value of private property. In modern times, we call that capitalism.

So when Hillary Clinton says "it takes a village," when Barak Obama says "we can shape for the better through collective effort," when Joe Biden says, "we must advance economic equity," when Klaus Schwab says, "you will own nothing and be happy," when Zohran Mamdani says "I don't think we should have billionaires," think back to William Bradford's leadership and vision 400 years ago, because human nature never changes, because the entrepreneurial spirit is God given, because that entrepreneurial spirit lives in the heart of all men yearning to be free. And just like the pilgrims, our survival as a nation and standing as the greatest nation in the history of the world depends on it.

True economic freedom is best won by free men, through free enterprise. It is a universal absolute truth. William Bradford understood it, Adam Smith understood it, our founding fathers understood it, the current Trump administration understands it.

Free market capitalism has lifted up and freed more men than any other economic system in human history, bar none. That belief, that ethos, that yearning, it is hard wired into the soul of men and it has been passed down from William Bradford, to our framers, to generations of patriots, to the industrialists, to the entrepreneurs of the 20th century, to us. It is universal in its truth but uniquely American in its practice. It is a gift that is ours to keep, nurture, and bequeath- and that, my friends, is something to really be thankful for.