Thanksgiving 2018 is over. Now the commercial frenzy of the extended Black Friday sales rampage is underway.

As usual, the well-off, self-anointed tasteful elitists are mocking the the sight of their supposed inferiors climbing over one another to rush the counters at Walmart, Target and similar stores across the land to buy whatever they can at discount prices. But, however disturbing some of the antics may be, it occurs to me that this annual demonstration of the immutatble power of market forces (“Buy low and take away!”) is an altogether fitting coda to our national Day of Thanks.

How so? The answer lies in the history of the Plymouth Colony. Comprised of deeply religious Pilgrims devoted to the glorification of God, the colonists saw fit to practice communal ownership of the means of agricultural production. There were no privately owned farms. It was intended that all would work unselfishly for the benefit of the community.

With their eyes lifted to Heaven, they trusted their individual fates to the good will and Christian virtue of each other. Since they were highly motivated to serve God and adhere to their religious tenets and altruistic beliefs, this should have worked. If it had, America might have become a social democrat nation instead of the land of capitalism.

But the plan failed miserably and was abandoned shortly after the Pilgrims arrived in America. Why?

The best and most concise description of how the Plymouth Colony’s socialist beginning came to an end appeared in a 2009 column by Professor Paul Rahe of Hillsdale College which was published on the website  Powerline. Here is Professor Rahe’s piece:

“On Thanksgiving, it is customary that Americans recall to mind the experience of the Pilgrim Fathers. We have much to learn from the history of the Plymouth Plantation. For, in their first year in the New World, the Pilgrims conducted an experiment in social engineering akin to what is now contemplated; and, after an abortive attempt at cultivating the land in common, their leaders reflected on the results in a manner that Americans today should find instructive.

“William Bradford, Governor of the Plymouth Colony, reports that, at that time, he and his advisers considered ‘how they might raise as much corn as they could, and obtain a better crop than they had done, that they might not still thus languish in misery.’ And ‘after much debate of things,’ he then adds, they chose to abandon communal property, deciding that ‘they should set corn every man for his own particular’ and assign ‘to every family a parcel of land, according to the proportion of their number, for that end.’

“The results, he tells us, were gratifying in the extreme, ‘for it made all hands very industrious’ and ‘much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been.’ Even ‘the women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn; which before would allege weakness and inability; whom to have compelled would have been thought great tyranny and oppression.’

“Moreover, he observes, ‘the experience that was had in this common course and condition, tried sundry years . . . amongst godly and sober men, may well evince the vanity of that conceit of Plato’s and other ancients applauded by some of later times . . . that the taking away of property and bringing in community into a commonwealth would make them happy and flourishing.’ In practice, America’s first socialist experiment ‘was found to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort.’

“In practice, ‘the young men, that were most able and fit for labor and service, did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men’s wives and children without any recompense. The strong, or man of parts, had no more in division of victuals and clothes than he that was weak and not able to do a quarter the other could; this was thought injustice. The aged and graver men to be ranked and equalized in labors and victuals, clothes etc., with the meaner and younger sort, thought it some indignity and disrespect unto them. And for men’s wives to be commanded to do service for other men, as dressing their meat, washing their clothes, etc., they deemed it a kind of slavery, neither could many husbands well brook it.’

“Naturally enough, quarrels ensued. ‘If it did not cut off those relations that God hath set amongst men,’ Bradford notes, ‘yet it did at least much diminish and take off the mutual respects that should be preserved amongst them. And [it] would have been worse if they had been men of another condition’ less given to the fear of God. ‘Let none object,’ he concludes, that ‘this is men’s corruption, and nothing to the course itself. I answer, seeing all men have this corruption in them, God in His wisdom saw another course fitter for them.’

“The moral is perfectly clear. Self-interest cannot be expunged. Where there is private property and its possession and acquisition are protected and treated with respect, self-interest and jealousy can be deployed against laziness and the desire for that which is not one’s own, and there tends to be plenty as a consequence.

“But where one takes from those who join talent with industry to provide for those lacking either or both, where the fruits of one man’s labor are appropriated to benefit another who is less productive, self-interest reinforces laziness, jealousy engenders covetousness, and these combine in a bitter stew to produce both conflict and dearth.”

The colonists were able to learn from their mistakes and honest enough to recognize that communal ownership didn’t work even for those who, no matter how pious, committed or high-minded, were nevertheless mere mortals with a human nature that was incompatible with the fundamental tenets of socialism. It would appear that there is a lesson here for today’s socialist acolytes.

So, would our social and political betters in academia, the media and the entertainment industry cease rhapsodizing over the supposed benefits of socialism long enough to heed the hard experience of the Plymouth colonists? I doubt it.

To the contrary, despite socialism’s extensive history of disastrous failure, it is clear that, if they have their way, all of us will be subjected to the “kind of slavery” that Governor Bradford and his followers rejected so long ago. Those religious people were able to turn from socialism because, first and foremost, they sought to serve God and to seek eternal salvation. But for today’s socialists of whatever stripe, socialism is their religion and they, like the Hebrews off old, “shall have no other god before them.”

All of us who disagree with today’s socialists must realize that we are dealing with the secular equivalent of religious fanatics impervious to facts, history or logic. They know what they know and, as so often happens with fanatics, they are prepared to condemn and punish the rest of us as heretics and apostates.