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United States News Title: Fox News, Tea Party continue to push Thanksgiving socialism myth The Tea Party never passes up an opportunity to press their anti-socialism message, and Fox News loves to join in on the fun. The most recent tale of capitalism triumphing over socialism concernst the Thanksgiving holiday. A video of Jon Stossel explaining this Thanksgiving myth can be seen to the left. According the the legend, the settlers merely starved because they originally commited to a form of socialism. According to the tale, everyone in Plymouth shared property and their crops. As a result, each settler had little incentive to work hard and many of them did not work at all. After nearly starving from a famine the settlers changed their ways and committed to private property and free enterprise. It was then that the settlers increased their crops and celebrated with the first Thanksgiving. It is a nice story which fits perfectly with the Tea Party philosophy. Unfortunately, the story is also completely untrue. First, the Plymouth and Jamestown colonies colony were hardly began as an experiment in socialism. The purpose of the Plymouth settlement was religious in nature. The pilgrims were being persecuted back in Europe and sought to escape this in Plymouth. Property was held in common in Plymouth, but the system was temporary and hardly resulted in famine. The first Thanksgiving actually occurred before the common property system was abolished in 1623. As for Jamestown, that entire enterprise was owned and operated by a corporation. The corporation operated something like a joint-stock corporation. Just like current shareholders of a corporations "share" in the profits, the settlers of Jamestown also shared in the benefits from the corporation. In fact, the Jamestown colony was the very definition of a capitalist enterprise from the start. This was an example of people using their capital to invest in a corporation in order to try and gain larger profits. If that is not capitalism, then it is hard to imagine what is. There was a famine in Jamestown, but this was mostly due to bad farming methods among other factors. Without the Native Americans, who did operate under more of socialist system, many people believe that the Jamestown settlers would have perished. Secondly, capitalism was hardly the reason for the growth of crops in the colonies. A much more reasonable explanation is that the settlers simply learned how to farm better in the new land. Many settlers did not know how to farm, and those that did only knew how to grow crops back in Europe. The climate and soil of the Massachusetts and Virginia required the growth of different crops, such as corn. When settlers started learning, as every farmer does over time, and using the "maize" seeds introduced to them by the Native Americans they started producing better crops. There are other factual errors in the Tea Party story, but those are the core distortions in the fable. This holiday is certainly a time to give thanks, but it should not be a time to spread false propaganda.
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#1. To: go65 (#0)
Who is Ryan Twitt and why should we care what he believes?
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