[geeks] can't wait for Vista

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Wed, 08 Nov 2006 @ 17:40 +0000, Mike Meredith said:

> Er ... no. One example doesn't demonstrate anything conclusive about
> communism. In a limited sense, communism worked reasonably well for
> hundreds of years in Russian villages as long as it didn't irritate the
> landowner.

I don't see that as communism, at least not in terms of a form of
government.

Are you saying those Russian villages formed a centralized state that
owned all production resources?

> Besides aren't there other examples of colonies failing or nearly
> failing in the US which didn't start communally ? Didn't Virginia have
> early troubles ?

Yes, but rarely because of the form of government.  Mostly it was just
because it was very hard.

For example, several were obliterated by a hurricane.

I wouldn't count that as a failure of government, although there are
a lot of people today who would probably blame the state and expect
everyone else to pay for it.

> Most early US colonists were not well prepared for a life in an
> environment where they had to be completely self-sufficient. England's
> economy by the 16thC was sufficiently along the path of specialisation
> that many of the colonists would have been specialists ... tradesmen,
> wool farmers, etc.

True.

Many colonies in America were business ventures.

What worked fine in UK or Europe didn't often work in isolated colonies.

Each was set up much like they would plan a town in England or Europe.
They'd hire the right number of each type of tradesman, and set
production goals for the colony. Usually they had a sponsor who would
provide initial funding in exchange for a percentage of future profit,
or the supply of some kind of goods or raw material.

Sounds great on paper: just do the math and it should work.

However, America was far too primitive for that model to work in many
cases. There were no other towns to run to for help, no established
sources of supplies, labor, or trade, etc. If your blacksmith died, you
couldn't just hire another one, you did without.

On top of that, sponsors had unreasonable expectations on how long it
would take to establish a colony. In many cases they expected a profit
in the first year, which was usually not possible.

Some colones were lucky, being able to supply a profitable good or raw
material almost immediately, but others required a lot more time to
stabilize and find profitable ventures.

-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- ["The trade of governing has always been
monopolized by the most ignorant and the most rascally individuals of
mankind.  -- Thomas Paine"]