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How the Pilgrims Saved Us From Socialism |
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© Jack Cashill Karl Marx had little use for America. From what he knew it was “pre-eminently the country of religiosity,” and yet it seemed to be the one nation that had been most thoroughly corrupted by ambition. Two strikes against America right there. The “free inhabitant” of New England, Marx wrote in “On The Jewish Question,” is convinced “that he has no other destiny here below than to become richer than his neighbor.” When he travels, he worries “only of interest and profit.” The world for the New England Yankee is “no more than a Stock Exchange.” As to idols, he has but one, and that is, of course, mammon. Marx wrote this in 1843, when J.P. Morgan was a first grader in Hartford, Connecticut and Marcus Goldman was peddling goods from a horse-drawn cart in Philadelphia. One sees in his rant a precocious anti-Americanism that would deform the thinking of the international Left for the next 165 years and find full flower, most recently, in the Occupy Wall Street movement. What Marx almost assuredly did not know is that two hundred years earlier, the very first New Englanders had taken a serious stab at the social scheme he was in the process of formulating. Plymouth Plantation governor William Bradford describes here the outcome of the colony’s ambitious “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” experiment:
Freed from the theoretical, Americans set about creating a distinctive and largely spontaneous commercial culture. Self-interest would drive it and self-control would restrain it. The Judeo-Christian legacy would inform that self-control and inspire it, but always imperfectly, given the fallen nature of man. The relative absence of external control would allow this dynamic to work itself out and, in the process, forge the most productive industrial enterprise in world history, but the balance between forces would always be a delicate one. On November 6, we saw how the mis-education of our children has helped upset that balance. Let the re-education begin, and there is no better way to start than by sharing Bradford’s words of wisdom over the Thanksgiving dinner table. |
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