Black Lives Matter launches Christmas campaign against 'white-supremacist capitalism'

Black Lives Matter launches Christmas campaign against 'white-supremacist capitalism'

Twitter tirade follows attack on Thanksgiving as a holiday celebrated on "stolen lands" with "dry turkey."

By Madeleine Hubbard

Black Lives Matter (BLM) is attacking two of America's most revered holidays, accusing Americans of "eating dry turkey and overcooked stuffing on stolen land" on Thanksgiving and promoting "white-supremacist capitalism" with Christmas.

The official Twitter account of the self-described "collective of liberators" posted, "YOU ARE ON STOLEN LAND" (original emphasis), with the subheading "Colonization never ended, it just became normalized."

BLM posted a series of Tweets on Thanksgiving about its ideology. 

For example, one tweet said, "This #Thanksgiving we send our deepest love to families whose loved ones were stolen by state-sanctioned violence and white-supremacy. 

May we offer a special prayer for those who will forever have an #EmptySeatAtTheTable."

"Colonization never ended," another tweet from the social justice organization stated. "It just became normalized. This nation was built on the stolen land of Indigenous people and the stolen labor and lives of our African Ancestors." The tweet directed users to a website showing where native tribes once lived across the world.

The day after Thanksgiving, BLM put up its virtual Christmas decoration, a Black Xmas profile picture. 

Elaborating on Black Xmas, BLM posted Saturday: "For 7 years #BlackLivesMatter has been drawing connections between white-supremacist-capitalism & police violence with our #BlackXmas campaign." The tweet included a link to an article in the Los Angeles Sentinel about Black Xmas by Dr. Melina Abdullah, a professor of pan-African studies at California State University, Los Angeles, and a "womanist scholar-activist."

In her article, Abdullah began by lamenting the Rittenhouse verdict. She then explained her vision for the future. "Now is when we must renew our commitment to struggle — not simply against white-supremacist-capitalism, but towards imagining and building new visions for the world and for Black people," Abdullah wrote.

For seven years, Black Lives Matter has encouraged people to "dream of a Black Xmas," according to Abdullah. This means "#BuildBlack (invest in Black-led, Black-serving organizations), #BuyBlack (spend exclusively with Black-owned businesses from Black Friday through New Year), and #BankBlack (move our money from white corporate banks to Black-owned ones).

"#BlackXmas is about being self-determined and felling existing structures by building new, and more viable, beneficial ones ... in the names of our mightiest and most righteous warrior Ancestors, in the names of those stolen by police violence, in honor of our community, and as a commitment to the generations to come."

Last week, Just the News reported that BLM activist Vaun Mayes of Wisconsin came under fire for saying that the Waukesha Christmas parade attack "sounds like the revolution has started."

The war on Thanksgiving is real and it's spectacular

The war on Thanksgiving is real and it's spectacular

JAZZ SHAW 

(AP Photo/Bree Fowler)

While most of us are celebrating a day intended to remind us to be thankful for the various blessings in our lives, there will always be some people so consumed with politics that they will play a role equivalent to the Grinch at Christmas. That seems to be the point being made this week by Matt Lewis in his latest column at the Daily Beast. The holiday is a target for some on the left who equate it to the genocide of indigenous Americans, colonialism and slavery. Matt further argues that there are some on the conservative side of the fence who have given up on the idea of American exceptionalism and might prefer some sort of monarchy where obedience to God and country are mandatory, stomping out some of the disruptive proclamations of the modern left. But how much of the Thanksgiving tradition is actually rooted in the early history of the United States and how much is founded in the words of Abraham Lincoln who first proclaimed it as an official holiday during the Civil War?

The culture war doesn’t take Thanksgiving week off, and its two main participants aren’t big on giving thanks, anyway.

The illiberal left wants to radically transform an inherently evil America that was founded on slavery and colonialism. The post-liberal right wants to forfeit the idea of liberal democracy, contending that modern America is weak, secular, and decadent.

Let’s start with the left. On Tuesday, the Women’s March issued an apology for sending out an email noting that their average donation this week had been $14.92. “It was an oversight on our part to not make the connection to a year of colonization, conquest, and genocide for Indigenous people, especially before Thanksgiving,” they said. This is stupidity that defies satire.

Meanwhile, MSNBC recently invited writer Gyasi Ross to talk about the “mythology” of Thanksgiving. “Instead of bringing stuffing and biscuits, those settlers brought genocide and violence,” he said. “That genocide and violence is still on the menu as state-sponsored violence against Native and Black Americans is commonplace. And violent private white supremacy is celebrated and subsidized.”

As Matt points out, the early history of European settlers in North America is complicated to say the least. The Pilgrims on the Mayflower did originally settle in what is now the United States and they signed a treaty with the Wampanoag Confederacy of Native Americans. They lived (mostly) peacefully together for roughly fifty years and they did indeed share a feast day in 1621 after their first successful harvest.

After that, the story changes quite a bit. During the westward expansion of the primarily European Americans, there were some atrocities committed by both sides at various times, but the indigenous people definitely got the worst of it. The situation wound up being just about as close to a true genocide as you’d care to imagine between warfare and the ravages of smallpox. Many inconvenient promises were broken and some of the bitterness over that portion of our history lingers to this day.

At the same time, treating America as some sort of special case in this sense is a completely false narrative. You would be hard-pressed to find a single country in the 21st century that isn’t inhabited by a mixture of people who originally arrived from somewhere else and displaced the humans who had settled there before them. This even applies to most of the countries in Africa (thought by many, though not all, to be the original birthplace of modern humans), where various tribes have tangled and ousted each other for centuries. The people we think of as Filipinos today are a mixture of Asian and Hispanic imports to the islands. The original inhabitants of the Philipines (the Negritos) live in small, isolated tribes in the mountains and look very different.

For better or worse, human history is written by the winners. But that’s still not what Thanksgiving is really supposed to be about. It’s a time to give thanks for whatever blessings you have received, no matter how meager those blessings may be at times. While you still have breath in your lungs there is always hope. And if you find yourself on this day simply having a roof over your head, food of any sort on your table, and some family or friends to share it with, you have much to give thanks for. There will always be those with more or less than yourself. So rather than spending your day shouting at the ocean about what a horrible place America is, perhaps you might help your blood pressure levels and your community by simply engaging in some quiet reflection and taking a moment to give thanks. If you have the ability to read this article today, you already have much to be thankful for compared to many others.

https://hotair.com/jazz-shaw/2021/11/25/the-war-on-thanksgiving-is-real-and-its-spectacular-n431353

AMERICA’S FIRST SOCIALIST REPUBLIC

AMERICA’S FIRST SOCIALIST REPUBLIC

BY SCOTT JOHNSON IN HISTORY

Paul A. Rahe holds the Charles O. Lee and Louise K. Lee Chair in the Western Heritage at Hillsdale College and is one of the country’s most distinguished scholars of history and politics. In view of his study of Republics Ancient and Modern, Professor Rahe is the academy’s foremost authority on the history of republics. Although his subsequent work on Soft Despotism was not far from his Thanksgiving reflections when he wrote this column for us in 2009, at the dawn of the Obama era, neither was his older work on republics. Posted here annually on Thanksgiving since 2009, it bears directly on the socialist temptation that confronts us yet:

On Thanksgiving, it is customary that Americans recall to mind the experience of the Pilgrim Fathers. We have much to learn from the history of the Plymouth Plantation. For, in their first year in the New World, the Pilgrims conducted an experiment in social engineering akin to what is now contemplated; and, after an abortive attempt at cultivating the land in common, their leaders reflected on the results in a manner that Americans today should find instructive.

William Bradford, Governor of the Plymouth Colony, reports that, at that time, he and his advisers considered “how they might raise as much corn as they could, and obtain a better crop than they had done, that they might not still thus languish in misery.” And “after much debate of things,” he then adds, they chose to abandon communal property, deciding that “they should set corn every man for his own particular” and assign “to every family a parcel of land, according to the proportion of their number, for that end.”

The results, he tells us, were gratifying in the extreme, “for it made all hands very industrious” and “much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been.” Even “the women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn; which before would allege weakness and inability; whom to have compelled would have been thought great tyranny and oppression.”

Moreover, he observes, “the experience that was had in this common course and condition, tried sundry years . . . amongst godly and sober men, may well evince the vanity of that conceit of Plato’s and other ancients applauded by some of later times . . . that the taking away of property and bringing in community into a commonwealth would make them happy and flourishing.” In practice, America’s first socialist experiment “was found to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort.”

In practice, “the young men, that were most able and fit for labor and service, did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men’s wives and children without any recompense. The strong, or man of parts, had no more in division of victuals and clothes than he that was weak and not able to do a quarter the other could; this was thought injustice. The aged and graver men to be ranked and equalized in labors and victuals, clothes etc., with the meaner and younger sort, thought it some indignity and disrespect unto them. And for men’s wives to be commanded to do service for other men, as dressing their meat, washing their clothes, etc., they deemed it a kind of slavery, neither could many husbands well brook it.”

Naturally enough, quarrels ensued. “If it did not cut off those relations that God hath set amongst men,” Bradford notes, “yet it did at least much diminish and take off the mutual respects that should be preserved amongst them. And [it] would have been worse if they had been men of another condition” less given to the fear of God. “Let none object,” he concludes, that “this is men’s corruption, and nothing to the course itself. I answer, seeing all men have this corruption in them, God in His wisdom saw another course fitter for them.”

The moral is perfectly clear. Self-interest cannot be expunged. Where there is private property and its possession and acquisition are protected and treated with respect, self-interest and jealousy can be deployed against laziness and the desire for that which is not one’s own, and there tends to be plenty as a consequence.

But where one takes from those who join talent with industry to provide for those lacking either or both, where the fruits of one man’s labor are appropriated to benefit another who is less productive, self-interest reinforces laziness, jealousy engenders covetousness, and these combine in a bitter stew to produce both conflict and dearth.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/11/americas-first-socialist-republic-7.php

MORE ON TRUMP’S TAXES...TRUMP CONFESSES TO THE NY TIMES TAX STORY

 MORE ON TRUMP’S TAXES

BY JOHN HINDERAKER IN DONALD TRUMP, MEDIA BIAS

Steve beat me to this, I see, but here are a few additional comments on the New York Times’s felony du jour. Well, to be fair, they just aided and abetted the felony. Maybe someday that will be illegal.

First, I doubt whether anyone cares. Donald Trump has been president for four years, and if you think he has done a good job (as I do), you are hardly going to be deterred from voting for him by the fact that he hires good accountants. The people who are excited about the Times felony/scoop weren’t going to vote for him anyway.

Second, on its face the Times “expose” falls flat. I understand that someone at the IRS feloniously leaked Trump’s tax returns for more than 20 years, and it is true, as Trump has said, that he has been subject to one or more audits also extending over a period of years. So apparently the IRS has been unable to find anything wrong with Trump’s tax returns. Case closed.

Third, this retired tax accountant supplies a knowledgeable perspective, as opposed to anything you might read in the co-conspirator Times:

[S]ure enough, this morning my feed is filled with people who don’t know shit about taxes retweeting the stupid opinions of other morons who also don’t know shit about taxes. This is just as annoying as last week when these same idiots all suddenly became Constitutional Scholars. Or the month before that when they were all experts on use of force laws and police tactics. Or the month before that when they suddenly got their epidemiology degrees from the University of Internet and turned into infectious disease experts.
***
Which brings us to today, with people freaking out about how Trump allegedly didn’t pay taxes for 10 out of 15 years and how that’s UNFAIR. Assuming that the anonymous tip isn’t total bullshit—and this is the New York Times we’re talking about and they love to just make shit up—and that the information is accurate (which means that whoever leaked it committed a felony, but that’s a whole different discussion)… my answer is so?

Is it plausible that a billionaire paid no taxes for a period of several years? Yep. Totally. See all that stuff I wrote above about the complicated tax code and how it is an accountant’s sacred duty to take advantage of all the stupid laws congress has passed to save their client’s money? Pretty much that. It has happened many times before, and it will happen many times again.
***
I recall a similar freak out several years ago when it came out that some giant mega-corp (I think it was GE, but I don’t remember) didn’t pay any taxes due to some Obama green energy tax breaks. Only that time the freak out was coming from the right (who hate Obama) and the Bernie Bros (who hate all business). It’s the same kind of thing though. If the laws are on the books, of course companies (and individuals) are going to take advantage of those laws. THAT IS WHY CONGRESS PUT THEM THERE.

Much more at the link. I believe it was Donald Trump who once said that the two places where you don’t try to save money are helicopter pilots and accountants. That is especially true if you are a real estate developer.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2020/09/more-on-trumps-taxes.php

TRUMP CONFESSES TO THE NY TIMES TAX STORY

BY STEVEN HAYWARD IN 2020 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, DONALD TRUMP, TAXES

Have you heard—Donald Trump admits that he takes advantage of the tax code to minimize his taxes! And he’s even admitted it to the New York Times! Here’s the scoop:

Donald Trump Acknowledges Not Paying Federal Income Taxes for Years

Donald J. Trump explicitly acknowledged for the first time during Sunday’s debate that he used a $916 million loss that he reported on his 1995 income tax returns to avoid paying personal federal income taxes for years.

Mr. Trump’s response — “Of course I do. Of course I do” — was the fullest the wealthy developer had provided since The New York Times reported that he had declared the loss, and that the tax deduction could have been large enough to allow him to avoid federal income taxes for up to 18 years.

Previously he had declined to comment on the documents, issuing a statement that neither challenged nor confirmed the $916 million loss.

The date of this scoop: October 10, 2016.

So what, exactly, is the “news” in the current New York Times story on Trump’s taxes that has everyone doing backflips? Aside, that is, from the fact that someone at the IRS violated federal law in disclosing Trump’s tax returns to the Times.

Contrast Trump, by the way, with Mitt Romney, who went out of his way to increase his income tax liability precisely to conform to liberal demands that rich people must be punished.

I expect this issue may come up in the debate tomorrow night, and I hope that Trump will challenge Biden to give an answer as to why Biden apparently made no effort to reform the tax code during his 35 years in the Senate, and why the Obama-Biden administration did nothing about it when they had supermajorities in Congress 10 years ago.

Funny the Times runs this story just now, isn’t it?

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2020/09/trump-confesses-to-the-ny-times-tax-story.php

AMERICA’S FIRST SOCIALIST REPUBLIC

BY SCOTT JOHNSON IN HISTORY, SOCIALISM

Paul A. Rahe holds the Charles O. Lee and Louise K. Lee Chair in the Western Heritage at Hillsdale College and has established himself as one of the country’s most distinguished scholars of history and politics. In view of his study of Republics Ancient and Modern, Professor Rahe is the academy’s foremost authority on the history of republics. Although his more recent work on Soft Despotism was not far from his Thanksgiving reflections when he wrote this column for us in 2009, neither was his older work on republics. Professor Rahe wrote this column at the dawn of the Obama era. It bears directly on the socialist temptation that confronts us yet:

On Thanksgiving, it is customary that Americans recall to mind the experience of the Pilgrim Fathers. We have much to learn from the history of the Plymouth Plantation. For, in their first year in the New World, the Pilgrims conducted an experiment in social engineering akin to what is now contemplated; and, after an abortive attempt at cultivating the land in common, their leaders reflected on the results in a manner that Americans today should find instructive.

William Bradford, Governor of the Plymouth Colony, reports that, at that time, he and his advisers considered “how they might raise as much corn as they could, and obtain a better crop than they had done, that they might not still thus languish in misery.” And “after much debate of things,” he then adds, they chose to abandon communal property, deciding that “they should set corn every man for his own particular” and assign “to every family a parcel of land, according to the proportion of their number, for that end.”

The results, he tells us, were gratifying in the extreme, “for it made all hands very industrious” and “much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been.” Even “the women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn; which before would allege weakness and inability; whom to have compelled would have been thought great tyranny and oppression.”

Moreover, he observes, “the experience that was had in this common course and condition, tried sundry years . . . amongst godly and sober men, may well evince the vanity of that conceit of Plato’s and other ancients applauded by some of later times . . . that the taking away of property and bringing in community into a commonwealth would make them happy and flourishing.” In practice, America’s first socialist experiment “was found to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort.”

In practice, “the young men, that were most able and fit for labor and service, did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men’s wives and children without any recompense. The strong, or man of parts, had no more in division of victuals and clothes than he that was weak and not able to do a quarter the other could; this was thought injustice. The aged and graver men to be ranked and equalized in labors and victuals, clothes etc., with the meaner and younger sort, thought it some indignity and disrespect unto them. And for men’s wives to be commanded to do service for other men, as dressing their meat, washing their clothes, etc., they deemed it a kind of slavery, neither could many husbands well brook it.”

Naturally enough, quarrels ensued. “If it did not cut off those relations that God hath set amongst men,” Bradford notes, “yet it did at least much diminish and take off the mutual respects that should be preserved amongst them. And [it] would have been worse if they had been men of another condition” less given to the fear of God. “Let none object,” he concludes, that “this is men’s corruption, and nothing to the course itself. I answer, seeing all men have this corruption in them, God in His wisdom saw another course fitter for them.”

The moral is perfectly clear. Self-interest cannot be expunged. Where there is private property and its possession and acquisition are protected and treated with respect, self-interest and jealousy can be deployed against laziness and the desire for that which is not one’s own, and there tends to be plenty as a consequence.

But where one takes from those who join talent with industry to provide for those lacking either or both, where the fruits of one man’s labor are appropriated to benefit another who is less productive, self-interest reinforces laziness, jealousy engenders covetousness, and these combine in a bitter stew to produce both conflict and dearth.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/11/americas-first-socialist-republic-5.php

This Thanksgiving, I’m grateful Hillary Clinton is not president

 2:46

Trump says he won’t revoke Obama’s 2016 Thanksgiving turkey pardon

President Trump said on Nov. 21 that he will not revoke the pardon that President Barack Obama granted to two Thanksgiving turkeys in 2016. (Reuters)

By Marc A. Thiessen  November 22

This Thanksgiving, I am grateful for many things — but when it comes to politics, I am especially thankful that Hillary Clinton is not sitting in the Oval Office.

I am thankful that Neil M. Gorsuch is on the Supreme Court and that President Trump has secured a conservative majority that will protect human life, religious liberty, the Second Amendment and limited government. I am also thankful the president is moving at record pace to fill the federal appeals courts with young conservative judges. While the Supreme Court only hears about 80 cases a year, the federal appeals courts get final say on about 60,000 — and because Democrats ended the filibuster, they can’t stop Trump from filling those courts with conservative legal rock stars. The Senate has already confirmed eight of Trump’s nine appellate nominees — the most this early in a presidency since Richard Nixon – and Trump will appoint plenty more before his first term expires. As former Clinton adviser Ronald A. Klain complained in The Post, “the next two generations of Americans will live under laws interpreted by hundreds of [Trump-appointed] judges.”

That alone is worth it. But there is more to be thankful for.

I’m thankful the New York Times’s Linda Greenhouse is complaining that Trump has appointed so many “individuals who have devoted their adult lifetimes to the anti-abortion cause” that federal agencies now resemble an “outpost of the National Right to Life Committee.”

While Congress could not repeal Obamacare, I’m thankful that failure now makes passage of conservative tax reform more likely, because House and Senate Republicans know that failure to do so is political suicide. And I’m thankful we have a president who is ready to sign that tax reform into law.

 1:28

3 strategies to get you through Thanksgiving

Dreading Thanksgiving dinner conversation? The Post's Alexandra Petri has three foolproof strategies to get you through your family gathering. (The Washington Post)

I’m thankful that Trump withdrew from the Paris climate agreement, isdismantling President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan, clearing the way for the Keystone XL pipeline, and undertaking the largest regulatory rollback in the EPA’s 46-year history.

I am thankful Trump has secured the release of American citizensimprisoned by China, North Korea, Egypt and the Taliban-linked Haqqani Network — without releasing senior Taliban leaders from Guantanamo Bay.

I am thankful that Trump finally enforced Obama’s red line on the use of chemical weapons in Syria, took the shackles off of our military in the fight against the Islamic State, got NATO allies to kick in $12 billion more for our collective security, imposed new sanctions on Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps , requested emergency funding for ballistic missile defense,declared North Korea a terrorist state, and sent a clear message to Pyongyang that it will not be permitted to threaten American cities with nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles. His foreign policy is far from perfect, but it is a marked improvement over the Obama-Clinton approach.

Trump hasn’t ushered in a new era of American isolationism. And despite the dire warnings of creeping authoritarianism, there are no gulags in the United States today. Quite the opposite, there are plenty of checks on Trump’s power. Federal judges have narrowed his travel ban, blocked his cut of funding for sanctuary cities, and stopped his ban on transgender troops. He has not changed libel laws to go after a free press, restored waterboarding, or built his border wall. Heck, he could not even repeal Obamacare. Our system of Constitutional checks and balances works — in some cases, too well.

The republic will survive the Trump presidency, and so will the Republican Party. I don’t buy the argument that Trump is doing irreversible damage to the GOP or the Republican brand. Nixon resigned in disgrace in 1974, and six years later we were inaugurating Ronald Reagan and then it was Morning in America again. If Trump does end up dragging the Republican Party down, all it takes is one great leader to resurrect it.

In the meantime, I want Trump’s presidency to be a success. Trump wasnot my first choice for president (or my second . . . or third . . . or fourth), and I am well aware of his many deep flaws. When he is wrong, I have called him out and will continue to do so. But I want Trump to fill the courts with conservative judges, reform the tax code, take on North Korea, counter Iran, defeat Islamist radicalism, roll back the regulatory state, expand school choice, and protect the unborn. And I’m thankful that because of his election, we are making progress on these fronts — and that Clinton is hawking books for a living.

That is something worth celebrating this Thanksgiving.

Read more from Marc Thiessen’s archive, follow him on Twitter orsubscribe to his updates on Facebook.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/this-thanksgiving-im-grateful-hillary-clinton-is-not-president/2017/11/22/68bafc9a-cee7-11e7-9d3a-bcbe2af58c3a_story.html?utm_term=.0cf93695920c

AMERICA’S FIRST SOCIALIST REPUBLIC

BY SCOTT JOHNSON IN HISTORY

Paul A. Rahe holds the Charles O. Lee and Louise K. Lee Chair in the Western Heritage at Hillsdale College and has established himself as one of the country’s most distinguished scholars of history and politics. In view of his study of Republics Ancient and Modern, Professor Rahe is the academy’s foremost authority on the history of republics. Although his more recent work on Soft Despotism was not far from his Thanksgiving reflections when he wrote this column for us in 2009, neither was his older work on republics. Professor Rahe wrote this column at the dawn of the Obama era. It bears directly on the socialist temptation that confronts us yet:

On Thanksgiving, it is customary that Americans recall to mind the experience of the Pilgrim Fathers. We have much to learn from the history of the Plymouth Plantation. For, in their first year in the New World, the Pilgrims conducted an experiment in social engineering akin to what is now contemplated; and, after an abortive attempt at cultivating the land in common, their leaders reflected on the results in a manner that Americans today should find instructive.

William Bradford, Governor of the Plymouth Colony, reports that, at that time, he and his advisers considered “how they might raise as much corn as they could, and obtain a better crop than they had done, that they might not still thus languish in misery.” And “after much debate of things,” he then adds, they chose to abandon communal property, deciding that “they should set corn every man for his own particular” and assign “to every family a parcel of land, according to the proportion of their number, for that end.”

The results, he tells us, were gratifying in the extreme, “for it made all hands very industrious” and “much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been.” Even “the women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn; which before would allege weakness and inability; whom to have compelled would have been thought great tyranny and oppression.”

Moreover, he observes, “the experience that was had in this common course and condition, tried sundry years . . . amongst godly and sober men, may well evince the vanity of that conceit of Plato’s and other ancients applauded by some of later times . . . that the taking away of property and bringing in community into a commonwealth would make them happy and flourishing.” In practice, America’s first socialist experiment “was found to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort.”

In practice, “the young men, that were most able and fit for labor and service, did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men’s wives and children without any recompense. The strong, or man of parts, had no more in division of victuals and clothes than he that was weak and not able to do a quarter the other could; this was thought injustice. The aged and graver men to be ranked and equalized in labors and victuals, clothes etc., with the meaner and younger sort, thought it some indignity and disrespect unto them. And for men’s wives to be commanded to do service for other men, as dressing their meat, washing their clothes, etc., they deemed it a kind of slavery, neither could many husbands well brook it.”

Naturally enough, quarrels ensued. “If it did not cut off those relations that God hath set amongst men,” Bradford notes, “yet it did at least much diminish and take off the mutual respects that should be preserved amongst them. And [it] would have been worse if they had been men of another condition” less given to the fear of God. “Let none object,” he concludes, that “this is men’s corruption, and nothing to the course itself. I answer, seeing all men have this corruption in them, God in His wisdom saw another course fitter for them.”

The moral is perfectly clear. Self-interest cannot be expunged. Where there is private property and its possession and acquisition are protected and treated with respect, self-interest and jealousy can be deployed against laziness and the desire for that which is not one’s own, and there tends to be plenty as a consequence.

But where one takes from those who join talent with industry to provide for those lacking either or both, where the fruits of one man’s labor are appropriated to benefit another who is less productive, self-interest reinforces laziness, jealousy engenders covetousness, and these combine in a bitter stew to produce both conflict and dearth.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2017/11/americas-first-socialist-republic-4.php