NerdDad found this great article by John Stossel over at RealClearPolitics about Thanksgiving. It point out that communal living spelled disaster for the Pilgrims and that it was only through individual land (and therefore production) that the Pilgrims were able to survive.

“So as it well appeared that famine must still ensue the next year also, if not some way prevented,” wrote Gov. William Bradford in his diary. The colonists, he said, “began to think 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. At length after much debate of things, [I] (with the advice of the chiefest among them) gave way that they should set corn every man for his own particular, and in that regard trust to themselves. … And so assigned to every family a parcel of land.”

If only they pointed that out in school.