Notable Quote - The Chinese version of the Pilgrims' first Thanksgiving? - Granite Grok

Notable Quote – The Chinese version of the Pilgrims’ first Thanksgiving?

I always try to remind myself to post the story of the Pilgrims’ first Thanksgiving – made possible from the radical shift from Socialism (which is how the Colony started as an economic system) to Capitalism.  Seems like Capitalism, regardless of what the Chinese Communist Party may wish to have admitted, just always beats Socialism when it comes to actual results (emphasis mine):

The first recorded incidence of private farming in post-Mao China occurred in Pengxi county of Sichuan province, in a village called “Nine Dragon Hill.” This village was one of the poorest in Qunli Commune, widely known in the region as a “village of beggars.” One evening in September 1976, Deng Tianyuan, the Party secretary of the commune, summoned a small group of cadres to discuss the problem of agricultural production. After a long and heated debate, they agreed to try private farming as a solution to the managerial and incentive problems that had dogged collective farming. Aware of the political risk, they decided to allocate only marginal land to households in two production teams, while keeping collective farming intact elsewhere. That year, the output of the marginal but privately cultivated land was three times higher than that of the collectively cultivated fertile land.

The next year, more land was privatized in more production teams.

Ronald Coase and Ning Wang (How China Became Capitalist)

What Socialists and Communists either don’t understand  (or constantly lie to themselves and everyone else) is that human nature 1) wants to be free, and 2) really can’t be “evolved” they way they think they can (people are not machines to be “programmed” – they are human (see #1)). When you can own and keep, of course you work harder as opposed to situations when you see that you are holding up all the slackers around you.  In the first case, positive results generally result in a redoubled effort.  In the latter, why work hard when no one else is – you all get just the same thing.

Share misery.

(H/T: Cafe Hayek)

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