John Stossel today discusses the origins of Thanksgiving and the hard-learned though now lost lesson of Thanksgiving:
What private property does — as the Pilgrims discovered — is connect effort to reward, creating an incentive for people to produce far more. Then, if there’s a free market, people will trade their surpluses to others for the things they lack. Mutual exchange for mutual benefit makes the community richer.
Such a lesson was not lost by longtime readers of The Locker Room, as John Hood and Hal Young have reminded us of them in prior years.
My newsletter today discusses those as well as how the colony at Jamestown also dearly bought this lesson. By transforming from a collectivist society to one of private ownership of land, Jamestown went from starvation with a “hallmark of idleness” to farmers “energetically growing” crops for export.
