Happy Thanksgiving

and lord, spare our progeny from the depredations of woodrow wilson and his heirs

Off air for a day or so, but do try to have a great time despite my absence.

Thought for the day comes from John Stoselle, who reminds us that socialism almost ruined Thanksgiving and killed the Pilgrims. You might want to give the article to your uncle from Yale, when he starts spouting off about Biden, the genocide implicit in Thanksgiving, and the virtues of ANTIFA.

They left the Old World to escape religious persecution. They imagined a new society where everyone worked together and shared everything.

In other words, they dreamed of socialism. Socialism then almost killed them.

The Pilgrims attempted collective farming. The whole community decided when and how much to plant, when to harvest and who would do the work.

Gov. William Bradford wrote in his diary that he thought that taking away property and bringing it into a commonwealth would make the Pilgrims “happy and flourishing.”

It didn’t. Soon, there wasn’t enough food. “No supply was heard of,” wrote Bradford, “neither knew they when they might expect any.”

The problem, Bradford realized, was that no one wanted to work. Everyone relied on others to do the work. Some people pretended to be injured. Others stole food.

The communal system, Bradford wrote, “was found to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment.”

“By the spring,” Pilgrim leader William Bradford wrote in his diary, “our food stores were used up and people grew weak and thin. Some swelled with hunger… So they began to think how ... they might not still thus languish in misery.”

Bradford’s solution: private property. He assigned every family a parcel of land so they could grow their own corn. “It made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been,” he wrote.

People who had claimed that “weakness and inability” made them unable to work now were eager to work. “Women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn,” wrote Bradford.

And everyone lived happily ever after.