re: #7 Lidane

I was listening to Michael Medved just now as I was coming home from Thanksgiving dinner with some friends and he was reading a bunch of stuff that was making this argument, and he tried to turn it into some sort of proof that the Pilgrims saw the evils of socialism early on, and they turned away from things like commonwealths (his word, not mine) because they were collectivist, and therefore evil and bad and wrong.

If I hadn’t been in someone else’s car and with friends, I would have started ranting and raving about this idiocy. I decided to be the better woman and not spoil the holiday mood. =P

But it’s not idiocy. It is a correct understanding of their experience with collective ownership of food and farm plots, and the consequences of that experiment. Whether you wish to call a policy that would have led to all the Pilgrims dying evil, or just stupid, or for the best, is your call. But whether they themselves deemed it an evil is not your call. It’s just history. Medved was right: under the circumstances, collectivism had proved itself tantamount to self-genocide. Kool-Aid.

They turned away from “commonwealths”, not because it was collectivist and therefore wrong, but because it was going to get them all dead, and they didn’t want that to happen.