{"id":1750370,"date":"2022-11-24T06:30:17","date_gmt":"2022-11-24T11:30:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1750370"},"modified":"2022-11-24T09:33:56","modified_gmt":"2022-11-24T14:33:56","slug":"john-stossel-thanksgiving-lessons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/john-stossel-thanksgiving-lessons\/","title":{"rendered":"John Stossel: Thanksgiving Lessons"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">8<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fjohn-stossel-thanksgiving-lessons%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1750370&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><div><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/9a4e6dc8-c69b-4fb2-a846-0b87f3c09837.jpg\" class=\"ff-og-image-inserted\" alt=\"image\" \/><\/div>\n<p>Thursday, if you eat a nice meal, thank the Pilgrims. They made Thanksgiving possible.<\/p>\n<p>They left the Old World to escape religious persecution. They imagined a new society where everyone worked together and shared everything.<\/p>\n<p>In other words, they dreamed of socialism. Socialism then almost killed them.<\/p>\n<p>As I explain in my <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=s4XcbM6nkBs&#038;feature=youtu.be\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">weekly video<\/a>, the Pilgrims attempted collective farming. The whole community decided when and how much to plant, when to harvest and who would do the work.<\/p>\n<p>Gov. William Bradford wrote in his diary that he thought that taking away property and bringing it into a commonwealth would make the Pilgrims &#8220;happy and flourishing.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>It didn&#8217;t. Soon, there wasn&#8217;t enough food. &#8220;No supply was heard of,&#8221; wrote Bradford, &#8220;neither knew they when they might expect any.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The problem, Bradford realized, was that no one wanted to work. Everyone relied on others to do the work. Some people pretended to be injured. Others stole food.<\/p>\n<p>The communal system, Bradford wrote, &#8220;was found to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Young men complained they had to &#8220;spend their time and strength to work for other men&#8217;s wives and children without any recompense.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Strong men thought it was an &#8220;injustice&#8221; they had to do more than weaker men, without more compensation.<\/p>\n<p>Older men thought that working as much as young men was &#8220;indignity and disrespect.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Women who cooked and cleaned &#8220;deemed it a kind of slavery.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The Pilgrims had run into the &#8220;tragedy of the commons.&#8221; No individual Pilgrim owned crops they grew, so no individual had much incentive to work.<\/p>\n<p>Bradford&#8217;s solution: private property.<\/p>\n<p>He assigned every family a parcel of land so they could grow their own corn. &#8220;It made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been,&#8221; he wrote.<\/p>\n<p>People who had claimed that &#8220;weakness and inability&#8221; made them unable to work now were eager to work. &#8220;Women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn,&#8221; wrote Bradford.<\/p>\n<p>The Pilgrims learned an important lesson about private property.<\/p>\n<p>Unfortunately, people keep repeating the Pilgrims&#8217; mistakes.<\/p>\n<p>Socialism is more popular than capitalism among college students. Many want everything shared, including their student loan debt.<\/p>\n<p>President Joe Biden wants to give them that by forgiving some of their student debt.<\/p>\n<p>Of course, then the debt would become a common, to be repaid by all taxpayers.<\/p>\n<p>That would punish people who had long ago paid off their debt.<\/p>\n<p>It would punish people who studied, worked hard, got jobs and were working to pay off college loans.<\/p>\n<p>It would people who went to trade school or no school at all.<\/p>\n<p>It would punish poor people because student loans are mostly held by the relatively rich.<\/p>\n<p>Government granted student loans <em>already<\/em>\u00a0create bad incentives:<\/p>\n<p>People who don&#8217;t like or benefit from college are encouraged to take out loans they can&#8217;t afford and go to expensive colleges anyway.<\/p>\n<p>Colleges increase their tuition, knowing that government will pay what students don&#8217;t.<\/p>\n<p>Forgiving student debt would make all that worse.<\/p>\n<p>Fortunately, Biden&#8217;s student loan forgiveness program ran up against legal challenges. I hope it&#8217;s dead.<\/p>\n<p>Students should learn from the Pilgrims: take responsibility for your own debt, work hard to pay it off, and don&#8217;t expect the public to fund your bad decisions.<\/p>\n<p>Bottom line: In a common, everybody takes as much as they can. That creates shortages.<\/p>\n<p>Private property creates prosperity.<\/p>\n<p>Every Thanksgiving, I&#8217;m thankful for that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Thursday, if you eat a nice meal, thank the Pilgrims. They made Thanksgiving possible.They left the Old World to escape religious persecution. They imagined a new society where everyone worked<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1750373,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[547],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1750370","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-bongino-report"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1750370","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1750370"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1750370\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1750373"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1750370"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1750370"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1750370"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}