What many people who support socialism don’t seem to know is that the first two colonies in what would become the United States, the Jamestown and the Massachusetts colonies, started out as experiments in socialism. Of course, they didn’t call it socialism back then, but that’s because that word and its definition as is used today hadn’t been invented yet, but they were socialist experiments, nonetheless. And if this is the case, we have North American examples of socialism more than four centuries old!
The Jamestown Colony
In May of 1607, 104 settlers arrived in what would become the Jamestown colony. They found plenty of seafood, plenty of wild game, plenty of fruits and nuts, and extremely fertile soil for growing crops. They had all the things they needed to be prosperous, always have plenty, and not be in want.
But they set up their colony in a way that in today’s terms would be described as being socialist. And what do you think happened? More prosperity and abundance? No! Absolutely not! Within six months only 38 out of the original 104 settlers were still alive.
In 1609, two years later, the Virginia Company brought 500 more people to the colony, of which most of them, 440 that is, died of starvation. It got so bad that some people were digging up the deceased, taking them out of the ground, and eating them, thus cannibalizing their own dead. Now, with all of the wild game, seafood, fruit and nuts, and fertile land to grow crops, how was it that most people died? Let me answer that question.
One of the people in the colony made it clear that the starvation had nothing to do with “barrenness or defect” in the land and had everything to do with lack of industry and “want of providence.” In other words, there was a lack of hard work and industriousness among the settlers, and that caused the shortage of food and abundance.
Everything that everyone grew or caught (fishing and trapping) had to go into a common pool to be shared equally by everyone. And, of course, the Virginia Company took their share off the top for being the governing body behind the colony, and to pay for bringing the settlers over from England. Because of this, no one benefited from their own labor. There were no rewards for working hard because none of the food you grew or caught was yours, and all was the property of the Virginia Company, who shared the food equally among the colonists, and kept some for themselves. No one benefited by working smarter or longer or harder, because it all got taken away from them. There was no connection between effort and reward, which you need if you want to maximize how much people work, and the abundance that is created through people’s work.
In other words, to use more modern language, this colony was set up as agricultural socialism. All colonists were taxed at 100%, some of the revenues (in this case, food, not money) were redistributed equally, and some were kept by the governing body (in this case, the Virginia Company).
This whole socialist set up, because people basically got punished and not rewarded for their hard work, ended up destroying the very work ethic that people needed to be motivated to work hard to produce that abundance. People sat idle or refused to even work. Younger people who had the most energy spent their time playing games rather than working – why would they want to work if there’s no reward tied to it?
This lack of effort, work, and industry led to a large deficiency of food, leading to colony-wide starvation. This, in my mind, is one of the biggest problems with socialism – it takes away the motivation to work and produce things of value, which represents abundance or wealth, because it doesn’t reward people for their hard work. People don’t get to enjoy the fruits of their own labor. The way it’s set up acts as a disincentive to work. How can you redistribute wealth and abundance when very little are being created because the very system set up to make sure everyone had an equitable share of the abundance took away the very tools and motivations used to get people to produce the things referred to as wealth and abundance?
The situation in Jamestown finally changed a couple of years later when the British government sent Sir Thomas Dale in 1611 to the colony to figure out what the problem was. He figured out almost immediately that the problem had to do with the socialized system of land ownership and redistribution of food in the colony. He consequently changed the rules, and gave each person three acres of land, of which they would have to pay a tax of only 2 1/2 barrels of corn to the Virginia Company. Anything else people produced they could keep for themselves or sell for a profit.
It was at this point in time that the Jamestown colony finally started to prosper. Every person knew that if they sat around and did nothing, acted lazy, and didn’t work hard, that they would pay for that behavior through lost profits. Increased hard work and effort led to increased rewards.
By replacing this system of agricultural socialism with private property ownership and letting people’s prosperity be dependent on their own hard work, which linked reward to effort, that totally changed things in the colony from a position of mass starvation to a place of growing prosperity.
By 1623, all property had been converted to private ownership. This change to private ownership and the rewards one yields from one’s own hard work is what represents the modern idea of capitalism to me – you get to be rewarded by your own risk and hard work.
The Massachusetts Colony
The Massachusetts colony had the same problem as the Jamestown colony. Within a few months, about half of the original settlers were dead. All because they set their colony up to practice agricultural socialism like in Jamestown.
William Bradford, one of the colony’s leaders, explained why there was a problem. He stated that the young men who were the most fit and capable of working shirked away from work because they thought it was unfair and unjust that they should spend their time and energy working for the benefit of other people, including other men’s wives and children, without any payment or reward. Not only that, but other people that worked only a quarter as hard as they worked would get the same amount of clothing and supplies as them, basically getting rewarded for doing less work, and they thought that to be unjust also. Also, when they were ordered by the colony’s leaders against their will to do work for other people with no pay or reward of some sort, it felt to them like slavery.
Bradford decided, like Jamestown did, to get rid of the agricultural socialism structure of the colony and replace it with private ownership. Every family got a piece of land where they were responsible for growing their own food. They could keep what they wanted, and if they had surplus, they could sell it for a profit. This motivated many to work hard so they could have that surplus.
By 1650, most of the families in the Massachusetts colony owned farms and prosperity was growing.
Conclusion
By the time the United States declared its independence in 1776, its economy was more than 100 times what it was 146 years earlier in 1630. And it wasn’t just because more Europeans had emigrated there by that time. It was because the economic structure was designed to let people be rewarded by their own hard work and innovation, which maximized the production of things of value that we look at as wealth and prosperity. By that time, Americans were already some of the most affluent people in the world because of their hard work, industriousness, and ingenuity. And because of the freedom they had to take risks, profit from those risks, and be rewarded by their own hard work.
If anyone in the United States claims that we’ve never tried socialism, they’re incorrect – our experiments with socialism actually go back more than 400 years. Or to put it another way, we have evidence more than 400 years old that socialism does not in fact work. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to historical evidence. So, why is it that we’re now in the 21st century, and we still haven’t learned our lessons from history?
