Armey was right.
"Jamestown colony, when it was first founded as a socialist venture, dang near failed with everybody dead and dying in the snow," Armey reported in his luncheon address.
Who knew they had socialists in 1607"
lib news room workers are idiots and don't know history.
Giving Thanks for Private Property
by Thomas J. DiLorenzo
by Thomas J. DiLorenzo
"Any free-market economy must necessarily rest on devotion to the sanctity of private property."
~Murray Rothbard, The Logic of Action One, p. 157
The first British settlers of America arrived in Jamestown, Virginia, in May of 1607. There, in the Virginia Tidewater region, they found incredibly fertile soil and a cornucopia of seafood, wild game, and fruits of all kind. But within six months, all but 38 of the original 104 Jamestown settlers were dead, most having succumbed to famine. Two years later, the Virginia Company sent 500 more settlers, and within six months 440 had died of starvation or disease. This was known as "the starving time" (See Warren Billings, ed., The Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century: A Documentary History of Virginia, 1606–1689).
In his excellent book, The Noblest Triumph: Property and Prosperity through the Ages, Tom Bethell cites an eyewitness to the starving time who diagnosed the cause, in old English, as "want of providence, industrie and government, and not the barenness and defect of the Countrie, as is generally supposed." The reason for this "want" of "industrie," as Philip A. Bruce noted in his Economic History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century (p. 212), was that "The settlers did not have even a modified interest in the soil. . . . Everything produced by them went into the store, in which they had no proprietorship." That is, there were no well established property rights; the first British settlers practiced agricultural socialism and, like socialism everywhere, it was an unmitigated disaster.
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