Tenacity: A Thanksgiving Lesson November 25th, 2010 by Dr. Mark W. HendricksonEvery fall in my Econ 101 course, during the last class period before we part for Thanksgiving, I share a lesson from early American history. It is particularly timely, because it deals with those we credit with the first American Thanksgiving, the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony. Upon arriving in New England, the Pilgrims shared “their meat, drink, apparel and all provisions” in common. As inevitably happens under collective ownership, the incentive to work disappeared. The grim result was food shortages, hunger, starvation; indeed, half of those who sailed on...