In his First Thanksgiving 1621, we see prosperous, black-clad Pilgrims in the company of new-found friends – bare-chested Indians in feathered war bonnets (one of several historical inaccuracies). The “thanks” here are for a bountiful harvest and the early realization of America as a land of milk and honey.

But how could it have been so easy for the settlers to carve a life out of the wildness in a cold and unknown land far from home?  Simple answer: It wasn’t, as most people instinctively recognize.

Out of 102 passengers on the Mayflower who arrived in Plymouth, Massachusetts, in December of 1620, 51, or exactly half, died from malnutrition or disease within a few months. The bereaved survivors must have been painfully aware of the precariousness of their own existence. They included William Bradford, the author of the classic Of Plymouth Plantation, who went on to become governor of the colony for many years. Gravely ill, his young wife, Dorothy May, either fell or threw herself to her death as the Mayflower lay at anchor in Cape Cod.

The Pilgrims did not build on a record of success.  As Donna Curtin, the executive director of the Pilgrim Hall Museum points out, “Many other colonies (in the Americas) had failed terribly.” Set up in 1607, the original English settlement in Jamestown, Virginia, had all but collapsed three years later – with 80-90 percent of its inhabitants lost to starvation and disease. In Ms. Curtin’s words, “They had murder, cannibalism, you name it – horrific, brutal conditions.”  No fewer than 10 colonies set up before Jamestown by the Spanish and French had also ended in disaster.

The Pilgrim leaders were well aware of this string of failures, as we know from Bradford’s journal. Coming with intact families and a strong sense of community, the Pilgrims bore more than a passing resemblance to the ancient Jews who sojourned in Egypt before going on to find their new home. Having fled religious persecution in England, the Pilgrims spent a dozen years in the Netherlands before fresh troubles there prompted many of their congregation to pin their hopes on the new world.

However, within three years of their landing, Pilgrims faced major problems of their own.   Bradford wrote:  “Famine began to pinch them [the Pilgrims] sore.”

The investors who paid their passage hoped to get an adequate payback on their investment in the founding company.  Fearing that would not be possible if people were free to farm their own land, they insisted upon “a common course and conditions” over the first seven years – under which there were no individual property rights and each member was entitled an equal share of total output.

Bradford recognized the demoralizing aspect of this arrangement. The industrious would subsidize the slackers; the most productive would get no more “in the division of the victuals and clothes” than the least productive. Instead of fostering harmony, communal property led to laziness, envy, thievery, poverty, and social dysfunction – just as it would in the 20^th Century through the spread of communism.

In 1623, Bradford and other leaders assigned to every family “a parcel of land” for its own use. With private property came economic freedom and individual initiative. “This had a very good result,” Bradford wrote, “for it made all hands very industrious” – leading to a big increase in corn production and far greater “contentment” for the community as a whole.

That’s how private property and economic freedom saved the Pilgrims. Happy Thanksgiving!

The post A Thanksgiving Reflection: How Private Property and Economic Freedom Saved the Pilgrims appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

As first appearing in the Kansas City Star and the American Spectator:

A surprised and outraged Franklin D. Roosevelt called it “a date which will live in infamy.” But Dec. 7, 1941, may also be remembered as one of the great turning points (for the better) in world history. It had the startling effect of rousing a sleeping giant (the United States) into purposeful action, and that was the primary factor in stopping the forces of evil from cruising to an easy triumph in World War II. In Churchill’s words, the world was in danger of entering “a new dark age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.”

The Japanese Imperial Navy struck Pearl Harbor in two waves beginning at 7:48 a.m. Hawaiian Time. Japanese aircraft destroyed much of the U.S. Pacific fleet and killed a total of 2,403 Americans – which compares to the 2,605 Americans and 372 U.S. residents from other countries who lost their lives in the surprise attack on the United States launched by al Qaeda on 9-11-2001.

As the Japanese readied for their attack, Hitler was sitting pretty – perilously close to winning a two-front war. Having already conquered France and other smaller European nations in 1940, German troops scored one victory after another against the poorly equipped and outmanned British Army in Southern Europe and North Africa in 1941. “Evacuation going fairly well – that’s all we’re really good at!” Alexander Cadogan, at the British Foreign Office, observed in his diary during the British withdrawal from Greece. “Our soldiers are the most pathetic amateurs, pitted against professionals.”

Things looked no better on the eastern front – with the German army on the outskirts of Moscow. In three parallel offenses, German forces invaded Russia in late June – sweeping across the vast countryside with the same lightning speed that marked the earlier invasions of Poland and Western Europe. Desperately short of every kind of war materiel from boots and rifles to tanks and planes, the Russian army was saved by the onset of winter.

Pearl Harbor changed everything – ending the long, enfeebling debate inside the U.S. between isolationists and interventionists. Suddenly, America was at war, and almost everyone – from FDR on down to Charles Lindbergh, hitherto an arch isolationist – agreed that this was a war that had to be fought with everything we had. Overnight Lindbergh turned from dove to hawk. Though unable to regain the Army Air Corps commission which he had resigned in April 1941, Lindbergh flew 50 combat missions in the Pacific Theater as a civilian consultant.

Within days of Pearl Harbor, hundreds of thousands of Americans made up their minds to join the armed forces. That included the two oldest sons of Joseph Kennedy, another isolationist and outspoken advocate of the appeasement of Nazi Germany, whose departure from London where he had served as U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James’s was a major addition by subtraction for both Roosevelt and Churchill. The older Kennedy left England in October 1940, at the height of the Battle of Britain, which reduced much of London and other cities to rubble.

My late father – then 24, a reporter with the Kansas City Star, with a wife and baby daughter – was one of the many who rushed to serve. He failed his first Navy physical – being exceedingly thin – but passed the second time after gorging on food and water. He was one of the “ninety-day wonders” – sent to officer training school for just 90 days of rigorous physical and classroom training – and went on to skipper a submarine chaser that saw action along the eastern seaboard, off the coast of North Africa, and in the North Atlantic.

If any disaster may be called a good disaster, it was Pearl Harbor, which awakened America with a violent start and averted what might easily have been the greatest setback to human freedom, joy, and advancement in world history.

Andrew B. Wilson is a resident fellow and senior writer at the Show-Me Institute.

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Economists of all stripes recognize the impacts that imposing such a wage on these employers would have. Most notably, it would reduce the number of jobs available for entry-level, unskilled workers. Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a left-leaning think tank that labor unions partly fund, noted on NPR’s Marketplace, “I’m sure you would see a lot of jobs lost.” Even a liberal economist agrees: Raising wages above that which market forces determine is a recipe for job loss.

How do Baker and others of similar views assuage their conscience at this prospect? When a hypothetical job loss of 20 to 30 percent was suggested, Baker responded that the remaining workers would “take home twice as much pay. They’re still way better off.” However, at the higher, artificial wage, fast-food employers will sensibly opt to keep the most productive workers. For the rest, well, they’ll just have to find employment elsewhere or be driven to rely on government assistance.

This episode and liberal support for it recalls an argument that economist John Stuart Mill made almost 150 years ago. Mill staunchly supported the rise of Unionism in England. Mill viewed union workers as the best representatives of the “upright and public spirited working man.” Mill argued that by excluding the “ignorant and untrained” part of the working class, unions benefited society. He believed that “We do them [the unskilled masses] no wrong by intrenching ourselves behind a barrier, to exclude those who competition would bring down our wages, without more than momentarily raising theirs.” Unions, in other words, would drive the unskilled and poor to the wall, reducing their numbers. And with a smaller labor force, there would be no downward pressure on wages overall.

Haven’t we learned anything over the past 150 years? Mill was just as wrong then as supporters of raising the minimum wage or mandating living wages are today. If everyone agrees that imposing wages that exceed those based on mutually beneficial decisions of workers and employers alike leads to increased unemployment for those who need work the most — the poor and the unskilled — how can responsible civic leaders call for further increases in the minimum wage?

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This is what has happened in Saint Louis and what would happen in Kansas City. Ridership from valuable and successful bus transit is depleted in favor of a much more expensive and much less flexible rail transit. In 1999, Tom Irwin, who was executive director of Saint Louis’ transit authority, the Bi-State Development Agency (now Metro), indicated that increases in rail ridership — in the face of a fare increase — seemed to come directly from bus ridership. From a 1999 St. Louis Post-Dispatch article:

The increase in light-rail riders is canceled out by the drop in bus ridership, meaning the agency’s revenue remains relatively flat, Irwin said. That’s because there are more bus passengers than rail riders, so each percentage point signifies a greater number of riders.

Years later, in 2008, Metro threatened to cut about half of its bus routes in Saint Louis if a sales tax, partially to expand light rail, was not approved. In other words, they would sacrifice efficient bus transit to pay for inefficient rail transit.

Kansas City voters have rejected light rail multiple times, so city officials contrived a special tax district in which only 300 affirmative votes were necessary to embark on a multi-million dollar city outlay. The line they propose will be along existing roads, and likely will not attract the traffic (or the convention business) to fill them. What is certain is that it will never be self-funding, but instead will require taxpayer subsidies in perpetuity.

Supporters of light rail will never be dissuaded from their vision. Economics will not do it, studies such as these will not do it, and in Kansas City, even repeated rejection from voters will not do it.

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Last night was obviously Snowmaggedon, and I hope everyone is staying safe out there as some of the roads are still nasty. The previous night, Wednesday, we hosted the second Show-Me Institute Saint Louis Book Club meeting of the year. We discussed the classic The Road to Serfdom, by Friedrich Hayek. The central theme of the book is that fascism is a natural outgrowth of socialist central planning. Hayek’s desperate wish was to warn the western nations, especially England and the U.S., not to pursue the path of central planning. Hayek believed that a descent into fascism was more likely than it seemed to his audience: the citizens of non-fascist western nations in 1944.

But all that just makes the book sound like a dated warning against something no one really advocates anymore, right? Well, the book has staying power because of two timeless features which are perhaps separate sides of the same coin: Hayek explains why the price system not only works, but is the best system possible for maximizing individual welfare while also making a strong case for individual liberty and limited government, which Hayek calls (using the connotation of his time), liberalism.

It was a wonderful meeting and a rousing discussion. Book club meetings start at 7 p.m. and usually wrap up about 8:30 or 9 p.m. But Wednesday’s meeting did not end until shortly after 9:30 p.m. — we all had so much to discuss. Here are some of the topics and ideas we discussed:

• Whether a person’s concept of what is possible constrains their action.
• The important distinction between freedom and power: what it is and why it is important that they not be confused.
• This wonderful quote from Adam Smith (introduced roughly by Hayek): “[the regimentation of economic life puts governments in a position where] to support themselves they are obliged to be oppressive and tyrannical.”
• Where Hayek drew the line on the proper role of government and how that might undermine his overall message of liberty.
• Whether market competition is inherently violent (hint: it is not).
• Whether a legal system is necessary for competition, and David Friedman’s “the discipline of constant dealings.”
• The contradiction and ugliness of “competitive socialism.”
• An extended interlude about “Little House on the Prairie.”

The reading for next month is The Machinery of Freedom, by David Friedman, another classic. Friedman is an economics and law professor with a Ph.D. in physics, and the son of free-market titan Milton Friedman. From the Amazon description: “This book argues the case for a society organized by private property, individual rights, and voluntary co-operation, with little or no government.” I am looking forward to some excellent discussion on this one at our March meeting, so please join us if you can (date of meeting to be announced, check here).

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As I said back in August, the Postal Service’s decline seems to be inevitable. USPS is subsidized not by tax dollars but by regulatory capture: The Private Express Statutes limit private mail carriers from delivering mail to mailboxes and from charging less than $3 to deliver a letter.

Luckily for the USPS, it doesn’t have to compete in a free market, where its work schedule would be drastically insufficient to compete successfully with others. UPS and FedEx don’t have the same regulatory luxury, and consequently have some locations that are open 24 hours a day and on weekends, because that is what customers want. Private delivery companies also price shipments based on distance traveled, which makes more sense than the flat rate that the USPS levies for first-class letters. Mailing a letter to one’s landlord in the next town over has a lower marginal cost for a postal service than mailing a letter to a cousin across the country, but first-class USPS prices don’t reflect that.

Unlike private delivery services, the USPS does not face direct competitive pressure, and so has found it difficult to adjust to changing technology and market conditions. This has left the agency well past its prime, if that prime ever really existed. James Bovard pointed out in a review of USPS history that government-provided postal services were originally conceived as revenue generators, and that regulators had to actively stamp out competitors who were providing more reliable, trustworthy services at lower prices:

The early colonists inherited the tradition of government postal monopoly from Britain. In sixteenth-century England, the Tudor monarch outlawed private post in order to hinder communication between potentially rebellious subjects. Later, the monopoly was justified as a revenue raiser for the Crown. But even 270 years ago, private carriers were breaking the law and providing the public with better service than the government:

In 1709, Charles Povey used bell ringers to collect letters, which he delivered anywhere in London for a halfpenny. The Post Office prosecuted Povey, who was convicted and fined, and then it adopted his system for the government service.[2]

Since 1709, not much has changed in how governments run their postal monopolies.

In 1789 the Constitution granted the federal government the right to set up a post office, but it did not prohibit competition from private services. However, the first postal act, in 1792, did effectively outlaw private competition.

The first postage rates were extremely high, as Congress tried to force easterners to subsidize the more expensive service to outlying settlements on the western frontier. As the Postal Service’s official history notes, “Until 1851, the cost of sending a single sheet letter 40 miles was either 6› or 8›. When the letter traveled over 400 miles, it cost 25›. These prices doubled, tripled, or quadrupled with each additional sheet.”[3] In 1843, “it cost 18 1/2› to send a letter from New York City to Troy, New York, but only 12 1/2› to send a barrel of flour the same distance.”[4] The government charged 25› to deliver a letter from Philadelphia to New York.

Henry Wells (later of Wells-Fargo fame) entered the market, charged 6› a letter, and delivered faster.[5] In the Boston area alone, over a hundred private express companies carried the mail. Private companies delivered letters directly to addressees’ homes, while the government still required people to pick up their mail at the nearest post office.

As private business flourished, government postal revenues declined. The postmaster general admitted in 1843 that many people thought the government’s monopoly was “odious,” but insisted that it had to be preserved for the good of the country.[6] In 1845, Congress tightened the laws prohibiting competition and increased the penalties for violators. In 1851, Congress lowered postal rates and began providing a direct subsidy for postal operations.

An 1844 competitor, the American Letter Mail Company, was founded and operated by notable proto-libertarian Lysander Spooner. This competition was so effective and efficient that “The end result was that in 1851 Congress again had to lower the postal rates to a uniform 3 cents” from previous prices “of 18 3/4 cents or 25 cents.” Lawmakers simultaneously put Spooner out of business for good by strengthening the USPS monopoly laws.

The notion that government postal services may have been necessary to provide a crucial public service in the absence of trustworthy private alternatives doesn’t stand up to the historical record, and is even less justifiable in today’s electronic information age, in which private companies are the primary means by which most people send and receive sensitive communication.

Missourians — and the United States in general — would greatly benefit if the USPS lost its monopoly protection so that costs could be reduced through the efficiency of competitive pressure, rather than through elimination of services.

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Booz Allen considered two potential U.K. HSR lines (London-Manchester and London-Edinburgh/Glasgow). They found that the CO₂ emissions required to move HSR passenger seats were about the same as those required to move automobile seats — hardly a slam dunk for rail. In fact, intercity bus came out considerably cleaner than HSR on a per-seat-mile basis.

HSR would emit less on a per-seat mile basis than air travel. But the major caveat is that all of these figures consider emissions from operations only, without taking into account the very large amount of pollution that will be created in the construction of the HSR system. […]

[Given] 100 percent rail ridership, emissions over a 60-year period would be lower if the HSR line was never built.

Keep in mind that this study focuses on high speed rail projects in England, but “given its high population density and short distances, Britain may actually be a better place for HSR than most areas of our country.”

It is worth noting that this study assumes static technological progress. This is not a fatal flaw. Assuming that technology will improve in the coming years and lead to lower environmental harm by way of trains, it is reasonable to conclude that this technological change would be widespread and trans-industrial. If historical trends are any indication, technological gains will be realized and implemented quicker and with more ease in airlines and automobiles, and at a pace that will continually outstrip the meager gains that trains will achieve.

The bottom line here is that for high-speed rail expansion to be at all environmentally friendly, ridership will have to spike to numbers that we can’t reasonably expect. This is an important realization, and is one that casts considerable doubt on claims that high speed rail is a necessary step to show true support for the environment.

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McWiliams begins by citing a 2006 academic study in New Zealand that determined Londoners could reduce their environmental impact by purchasing lamb imported from New Zealand rather than lamb produced in England, because factors other than transportation often play a far larger role in environmental impact.

Mcwilliams continues by discussing how economies of scale in production can positively distribute environmental costs:

To choose a locally grown apple over an apple trucked in from across the country might seem easy. But this decision ignores economies of scale. To take an extreme example, a shipper sending a truck with 2,000 apples over 2,000 miles would consume the same amount of fuel per apple as a local farmer who takes a pickup 50 miles to sell 50 apples at his stall at the green market. The critical measure here is not food miles but apples per gallon.

We’ve argued on this website before that locavore policies constitute a new form of protectionism. This is true, but likely not a very compelling line of reasoning for locavores.

In this case, the economically efficient and environmentally efficient solutions do not have to be polarly aligned. Locavores should understand how their actions may fail to uphold the values they are rooted in, because of logistics and unintended consequences that haven’t been thoroughly considered. It’s even more important to view with a skeptical eye any legislation, government purchases, or changes in trade policy based on the reasoning that local consumption equates to environmentally friendly consumption.

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