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.

Why? Because governments are terrible at figuring out how development dollars should be allocated — to entertainment? to bars? to factories? to homes? — and simply do not have the knowledge that is embedded in the marketplace to make many developments successful. The decisions of individuals, maximizing their own well-being, are why most cities came to be. They are why good cities became great, and great cities became world-class. It is why cities that have fallen on hard times can be great again, if the government will stop meddling.

On a personal note, I was raised in the Northeast area of Kansas City, which for the last 100 or so years has been a heavily immigrant community. It is not necessarily “hip,” but it is real. Inexpensive housing plus ready employment made it an ideal place for a newcomer to the States to, sometimes literally, set up shop and grow a family. It is why my mother’s Italian family came there, why Jewish families came before them, and why Hispanic and Vietnamese families came after them.

“Old Northeast,” as it is often called, has a meaningful and enduring story, I think, because its history emerged naturally. Its story is a story of people, not of government or government-sponsored “big ideas.” It is a story about authenticity, not artificiality — about the uniqueness of the Kansas City experience. One chapter closes, another opens, and the story continues, but it is a story built by people, not by development experts that the city or state enlist to “revive” an area’s fortunes. Part of the problem that Missouri and her cities have is that instead of harnessing the potential of all their citizens and diversifying their growth opportunities, they are too often just tinkering with one government-subsidized development after another.

Check back later this week for Part Three. Rest assured, we will be adding meat to these broad philosophical bones.

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Well, the school’s leaders have submitted a new proposal — and this time they’ve done away with the Hebrew-language specialty. Hebrew would still be an option at the school, but students would be free to concentrate on Spanish or Arabic instead.

It would be very detrimental to language-immersion charters if this board’s policy became the norm, and no charter could specialize in a single language or culture. For example, the St. Louis Language Immersion Schools teach French and Spanish — in two separate schools. This allows them to reinforce students’ exposure to the target language. Students hear the target language in class, but they also hear it on the playground and in the school office. If each school had to offer both languages, French students would end up hearing some Spanish, and vice versa.

If applied more broadly, this policy could make it difficult for charters to specialize, because as soon as a charter developed a program to focus on one subject, it would have to start over and create parallel programs for whichever students weren’t interested in that first course of study.

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“By requiring the students study Hebrew, I think you’re effectively limiting (who would apply),” said Dennis King, a former Hart school board member of 20 years. “So it’s sort of an ethnic school. It’s a school that appeals to a particular culture. . . . I suspect 95% of the kids will be Jewish.”

I hope this way of thinking doesn’t become prevalent in Missouri, because I’m happy about the growth of language-immersion charters here and I’m afraid the argument could be used against them as well. The St. Louis Language Immersion Schools have suggested the possibility of opening new schools in the future. Would they be barred from opening a Japanese school because many students would be Buddhists, or an Arabic school because many Muslims would apply?

As long as the school does not promote religion, there’s nothing wrong with teaching a language that’s associated with a religious group. Public schools do it all the time; Ladue teaches Hebrew, and Bunche teaches Arabic. If public schools can teach these languages for an hour or two a day, charters should be able to focus on the same languages and teach them in more depth.

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I would find it cute and informative if a Jewish organization published this poster in an effort to educate people simultaneously about hygiene and Jewish religious practices. But the state shouldn’t tell people how to practice Judaism, or any other religion.

I’m not against translating government documents into foreign languages, and translating a poster into Yiddish could be reasonable in a city with a large Jewish population. However, the translation should present the same content as the original — it shouldn’t add religious instructions.

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