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Colonial America Already Ran the Socialist Experiment. It Failed.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani told ABC’s Jonathan Karl last month that a democratic socialist can win any office in the country. He may be right about the contemporary politics, but he is dead wrong about the underlying economics, and Colonial America proved it four centuries before he took the oath of office.
The issue stems from a fundamental question: What makes people act in someone else’s interest instead of their own? The answer, every time, is incentive. Tie a person’s effort to their reward and they produce. Sever that link and they stop trying, no matter how godly or how disciplined the group is. The Pilgrims proved that before they proved anything else about religious liberty, and they proved it the hard way.
Plymouth Colony launched in 1620 under a communal labor arrangement forced on the settlers by their London investors. Everyone worked the common fields. Everyone drew from the common store, regardless of how much they had contributed to it.
Gov. William Bradford, who lived through it and buried half the colony after that first brutal winter, later wrote that the “common course and condition” bred “much confusion and discontent and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort.”
Young, able-bodied men resented working for other families without any personal payoff. Wives ordered to cook and clean for households outside their own considered it something close to servitude. Bradford, a devout man who had every reason to want communal Christian charity to succeed, concluded that the arrangement did not fail because the colonists were wicked. It failed because it asked fallen human beings to behave like angels, and none qualified.
Jamestown ran the same experiment 13 years earlier with the same result, only worse. The Virginia Company set up collective farming so the London shareholders could claim a share of everything produced. Colonists who had every reason to plant, hunt, and build instead let the fort rot and, according to contemporary accounts, spent their days bowling in the street while stores dwindled.
Roughly 80% of the population died in what history remembers as “the Starving Time.” Gov. Thomas Dale arrived in 1611, looked at the wreckage, and did the one thing the shareholders had not authorized: he handed every man three acres of his own ground to farm for himself. Colonists began “gathering and reaping the fruits of their labors with much joy and comfort,” in John Rolfe’s words, and the colony that had nearly died of collectivism started feeding itself within a season.
Plymouth learned the same lesson two years later. Bradford assigned each family its own plot instead of a shared field, and the shift, in his account, made all hands industrious enough that the harvest that followed became the first Thanksgiving.
Two colonies, two governors, two independent experiments in common ownership, and identical outcomes. Neither Bradford nor Dale had read Adam Smith, who would not publish “The Wealth of Nations” for another century and a half. They didn’t need the theory. They had the corpses.
That is the inconvenient history sitting behind every modern promise that this time collective control of housing, health care, or wages will work out differently. It has been tried on this continent longer than the United States has existed, and it has produced the same failure that the 20th century confirmed at industrial scale in the Soviet Union and Maoist China. And that’s not even mentioning contemporary Venezuela or Cuba, a country sitting atop the world’s largest oil reserves that still cannot keep grocery shelves stocked.
Thomas Sowell spent a career making the point plainer than I can: incentives, not intentions, determine outcomes. A system can be staffed entirely by sincere, hardworking people and still collapse if it severs the link between what a person produces and what a person keeps.
I see a version of this same failure mode in my work as an expert witness on fiduciary duty, albeit on a much smaller scale. When a trustee or an investment committee loses sight of whose money they are actually managing, performance sags long before anyone commits outright fraud. The discipline evaporates first, then the returns follow.
Plymouth and Jamestown were, in effect, two colony-sized trusts with no beneficiary accountable for the outcome. Everyone was a shareholder in the harvest, and no one was responsible for growing it. That is not a design flaw you can legislate around.
None of that means Americans owe each other nothing. The Plymouth colonists still hunted, fished, defended the settlement, and worshipped together after they abandoned the common course of labor. I am not arguing that cooperation and charity are not real or important.
The argument is narrower, and it is the one Mamdani’s supporters keep skipping past: Producing wealth at scale requires private ownership and the freedom to keep what you build, while distributing wealth once produced can be a matter of family, community, or voluntary generosity. Collapse those two categories into one government-run system and you get Plymouth’s first winter, not its eventual harvest.
Mamdani frames his politics as pragmatic delivery rather than ideology, telling Karl he was not interested in reading or writing a manifesto, only in results. Fair enough. Let’s judge by results.
His own city has already forced him to walk back a campaign promise to expand rental vouchers because the fiscal math didn’t survive contact with a shrinking tax base and businesses voting with their feet. That is an example of the same math that broke down at Jamestown and Plymouth, running at a scale those two governors never had to manage.
I coached hurdlers, and I told every kid the same thing before a race: Nobody clears a barrier by pretending it isn’t there. The barrier here is human nature, and it has never once moved for a new slogan. William Bradford figured that out with a spade in a frozen field in 1623. New York is about to relearn it with a budget.
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