In progress/communism failed at Plymouth Colony
I'm shelving this claim for now as a trolling attempt, but keeping the research on hand in case it surfaces again.
Claim
The Basic Income thing has already been tried on this continent. Read some history. It failed in Jamestown in 1606 and it failed in Plymouth in 1620. Actually it took a couple of years to fail in each case. The only thing that saved those two colonies was to scrap the Basic Income plan they had, privatize the property and tell everybody to do what they could with it. It is in the books.
— Randall Tuura, 2014-12-27 comment
They did not have a basic income, they had pure communism. Everything belonged to the community, the houses, the land - everything. Everyone was entitled to one common share out of the storehouse. And able bodied men worked the farm. Then they realized that an older man who could not work as much and had a wife and six children was entitled to EIGHT times as much as they did as young single men. Since the young single men did most of the work they thought it was unfair and slacked off. The colony nearly died out according to the eyewitness William Bradford. That is until he scrapped the original concept and instituted private property rights and free market capitalism.
— Randall Tuura, 2014-12-27 comment
Questions
- Where in the text does it describe this "pure communism"?
- Lacking an economy -- being only a start-up colony of ~100 people -- exactly how else could they have lived?
- How does a failure of a communist society have anything to do with UBI?
Links
- Wikipedia:
- Plymouth Colony
- Of Plymouth Plantation: the definitive contemporary account by William Bradford