Will the 2024 election be a referendum on socialism? Socialism, in the name of “neighborliness,” acts as if money grows on trees. It does not.

Socialism is forced redistribution of wealth by the government. In confiscatory taxes, the government takes from the productive to give to the poor. It may sound good to the naïve, but in reality, it hurts the poor more than anyone because its policies cause inflation. The only ones who really benefit from socialism are the administrators.

The dirty little secret about socialism is that it fails every time. Long before we became a country, the Pilgrims were forced to practice a form of socialism.

We explain the details of the Pilgrims’ experiment in socialism in our Providence Forum documentary, “The Pilgrims.”

One of the stipulations of the London Adventurers, a group of investors who had lent money to the Pilgrims for the voyage of the Mayflower, was that everyone in the colony was to divide all the proceeds of the colony equally…no matter how much work he or she did. The problem with this imposition is that those who worked hard were paid just the same as those who chose not to work at all. This incentivizing of laziness undercut productivity immensely.

One guest of the program was Dennis Prager, the founder of PragerU. He told our viewers: “The Pilgrims did experiment with socialism or communalism, and they realized it didn’t work. They embodied this. It didn’t take long to realize that doesn’t work. It is against human nature. The moment you tell people that the community will take care of you, they work less. It undermines character.”

Leo Martin, the founder of the Jenney Museum/Learning Center in Plymouth, added, “in 1623, Governor Bradford changed the deal. We’re going to stop a communal existence; we’re going to go to land ownership. Every family will own their own land, grow their own food, and feed themselves, and we’ll trade with each other what we have left over. Free trade, that worked, they never had a starving day after that, they tripled their production….Shows you what an incentive will do; works every time.”

About this episode, law professor John Eidsmoe writes: “The Pilgrims did not abandon their ideal of a Christian colony; they embraced it. They abandoned an imposed system contrary to the laws of God and the nature of man, embracing instead a system consistent with biblical principles and human nature.”

The 20th century saw one failed experiment in socialism after another, including the Soviet Union.

Ronald Reagan used to collect jokes that Russians would tell each other in the Soviet Union, to ameliorate the misery of living under Communism. Such as the one about the man trying to buy a car, somewhat of a rarity for the common people in those days.

The man fulfilled his obligations, including paying all the money for the car up front. The bureaucrat told him that he had successfully completed his paperwork – and he would get his car in ten years. The man asked, “In the morning or the afternoon?” The bureaucrat was taken aback and replied, “Comrade, it’s ten years from now. What do you care whether it’s the morning or the afternoon?” The man said, “Well, I’ve got the plumber coming in the morning.”

Here in modern America, the federal government is bankrupting our children and grandchildren.

For example, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities notes the federal government spent $6.1 trillion in 2023, and we received $4.4 trillion in revenue. The rest was borrowed. And it’s been like this for a few years now. This is an unsustainable path.

Sometimes it’s hard to grasp how big a trillion is, compared to a million or a billion.

If I owed you $100 and said I’d pay you in a million seconds, you’d be repaid in 12 days.

If I owed you $100 and said I’d pay you in a billion seconds, you’d be repaid in 32 years.

If I owed you $100 and said I’d pay you in a trillion seconds, you’d be repaid in 32,000 years.

And we have deficit spending year after year of more than a trillion dollars.

Thomas Jefferson warned us so long ago: “I place…public debt as the greatest of dangers to be feared. To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. If we run into such debts, we must be taxed in our meat and drink, in our necessities and in our comforts, in our labor and in our amusements.”

Finally, our third president added, “If we can prevent the government from wasting the labor of the people, under the pretense of caring for them, they will be happy.”

We the people get decide on which path we choose in the 2024 election.