Tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day, on which we give thanks for the bounty we enjoy as Americans. If we stop to think about it, we owe our material prosperity to our exuberant free-enterprise system.

This was not always so. In fact, our Pilgrim forbears initially based their Plymouth Plantation on collectivist principles. In the beginning, the rule in Plymouth was share and share alike. Nobody owned anything, and whatever was produced became the common property of all.

This was poor economics and bad psychology. Since everyone would receive the same no matter how hard he or she worked, there was no incentive to excel. The community foundered and nearly starved.

Finally, communal living was abolished. Each settler was given his own tract of land to cultivate. The colony’s fortunes immediately improved, and the result was the first Thanksgiving in 1623.

In his history of Plymouth, Governor William Bradford summarized the great lesson that his people had learned by this experience. The language is quaint, but the message is a pertinent as ever:

The experience that was had in this commone course and condition, tried sundrie years, and that among Godly and sober men, may well evince the Vanitie of that conceite of Plato’s and other ancients, applauded by some of later times, that the taking away of propertie and bringing in communitie into a commone wealth would make them happy and flourishing; as if they were wiser than God!

Amen, Governor Bradford. And Happy Thanksgiving to all.