But things were not always that way in America, and I thought it might be useful to look back at the Pilgrims' first few years, years when there was little enough to be thankful for. Those years were, in a word, bleak. By the end of the first winter, half the colonists had died, victims of disease and starvation. And while historians often credit the weather for those disastrous first years, a look back through the economist's lens reveals the true source of the economic chaos that reigned: the lack of private property.
Upon landing in the new world, the Pilgrims quickly established communal ownership of all pastures, and communal ownership of all agricultural production. As any introductory student of economics could predict, the result was underproduction and overconsumption, a net shortage of food.
How, then, did the Pilgrims achieve their first bountiful harvest? Governor William Bradford, noting that communal ownership "was found to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort," assigned each family a parcel of land to do with as they pleased. Bradford writes, "This had very good success, for it made all the hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been by any means the Governor or any other could use . . . "
Bradford's recipe worked, and it worked well. It was so successful that, as abhorrent as private property was to communist leaders, country after country in the communist bloc relied on similar schemes to feed their people. In the Soviet Union, private garden plots accounted for less than four percent of arable land, but were responsible for a third of total Soviet agricultural production.
Private property encourages harder work, smarter work, and more useful work. It encourages it through the promise of reward commensurate with effort, vision, and intelligence. Sometimes, of course, working harder or smarter fails to bring those rewards. Perhaps one's timing is wrong, or the market misunderstood. But private property gets it right more often than not, and it is only the system of private property that contains the promise of ever richer and more bountiful Thanksgivings to come. So this Thanksgiving, raise your glass to private property. It's earned your thanks .
