Posted on 07/02/2026 9:01:04 AM PDT by SmokingJoe
In 1825, a rich Welsh industrialist bought an entire American town to prove that socialism could work.
He had the money, the buildings, the theory, and hundreds of eager followers waiting to move in.
Two years later, it was over. 🧵
(Excerpt) Read more at x.com ...
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Many of us don’t have X, don’t want X, and don’t want a profile on any social media. Who is the person and where was the town?
Thank you. Agree
What town? Detroit?
If it doesn’t work and its been proven should we have to put up with it? Make it illegal?
https://xcancel.com/i/status/2072447065397825701
Robert Owen paid around $150,000 for the town of Harmonie, Indiana. He got 20,000 acres, more than 160 buildings, working mills, and farms already producing food.
He renamed it New Harmony. Close to a thousand people arrived in the first year.
Practically every cult religious movement since the beginning of time tries to prove “socialism works.”
Recently read about the Oneida Community, a millennial Christian sect formed in NY State in 1848 by a man named John Humphrey Noyes. It exemplified later marxists organizations, with all property held in common and “member committees” making all decisions.
Of course, they also had the post-modern/socialist belief of “free love” and men all sharing the women of the community.
Suffice it to say, this cult didn’t last too long
Just like what happened with the Pilgrims and our first Thanksgiving .... they tried socialism then and it didn’t work, they almost all starved before ending it.
Robert Owen paid around $150,000 for the town of Harmonie, Indiana. He got 20,000 acres, more than 160 buildings, working mills, and farms already producing food.
He renamed it New Harmony. Close to a thousand people arrived in the first year.
He believed that if you removed private property and paid everyone equally, cooperation would naturally replace competition.
+1
The hardest workers were feeding, housing, and clothing neighbors who did nothing while receiving the same food, the same shelter, and the same rewards.
So they stopped working too. Why wouldn't they?
Production dropped and food ran short. Buildings decayed because no one owned them and no one was responsible for maintaining them. Endless meetings replaced actual work. Owen wrote seven different constitutions in two years trying to fix it. None of them worked.
The Socialist idea is this : “Pay workers a living wage while allowing people to not work and still live comfortably”.
So you establish a living wage (say $30 an hour) and then the government takes $20 an hour in taxes so you are really making $10 an hour which is not a living wage. That’s the way Europe is going. You have free services available to everyone but people don’t have money to spend.
That’s why Euros were so amazed at what they found in America.
America has a long history of people starting utopian communities.
If only all socialist experiments lasted 2 years.
Socialism/communism always fails, when the productive people realize they’ve been taken for suckers while the lazy/unproductive failures get all their needs taken care of.
Summary for those who can’t watch the whole thing - A fool and his money are soon parted.
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