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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: combjelly who wrote (555477)3/16/2010 5:22:27 PM
From: longnshort  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 1576830
 
" the mosquitoes weren't so bad and they brought in people with a background in farming."

bullshit, they didn't go to Williamsburg until later. No one want to farm when it went to the company store, they could look for gold and let others farm for them

Two years later, the Virginia Company sent 500 more settlers, and within six months 440 had died of starvation or disease

no farmers in this group either ?? you are so full of shit.

socialism failed them like it always fails mankind



To: combjelly who wrote (555477)3/16/2010 5:25:13 PM
From: longnshort1 Recommendation  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 1576830
 
Bethell recounts how, in 1611, the British government sent Sir Thomas Dale to serve as "high marshal" of the colony. He immediately diagnosed the problem as the absence of property rights in the land, and subsequently determined that each man would be given three acres of land and be required to work no more than one month per year to contribute to the colony, i.e., to pay taxes.

Once private property was established the colony immediately began to prosper( I thought you said they moved). Bethell cites the historian Mathew Paige Andrews, author of Virginia: The Old Dominion, as saying: "As soon as the settlers were thrown upon their own resources, and each freeman had acquired the right of owning property, the colonists quickly developed what became the distinguishing characteristic of Americans – an aptitude for all kinds of craftsmanship coupled with an innate genius for experimentation and invention." The Indians, who had previously looked down upon the settlers as incompetents, began trading furs and other items for the corn that was being harvested by the settlers.



To: combjelly who wrote (555477)3/16/2010 5:28:33 PM
From: longnshort  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 1576830
 
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.

The problem was that all of the men were indentured servants who had no significant financial stake in the fruits of their own labor. For seven years, all that they produced was to go into a common pool to be used, supposedly, to support the colony and to generate profits for the Virginia Company. Working harder or longer provided them with no rewards, so they shirked – and starved.