Ideas have consequences
- David Lane
- Nov 4, 2025
- 4 min read
William Bradford [1590-1657] helped draft and sign the Mayflower Compact before the ship’s 102 passengers disembarked at Cape Cod in November 1620. That first winter was devastating; half the company, 51 souls, perished from cold, disease, and hunger.
John Carver [1576-1621], the colony’s first governor, died suddenly in the spring of 1621 from sunstroke while working in the fields. Shortly thereafter, Bradford - then only 30 years old - was unanimously elected governor by the 51surviving colonists.
Bradford would serve for the next 36 years [1621-1657], except for brief intervals when others were chosen to give him rest. His leadership provided stability, order, and moral direction to the fragile settlement.
Perhaps his most enduring legacy was his rejection of communal economics. The Pilgrims’ first experiment in collective ownership - “each according to his need”- brought famine and despair. Bradford chronicled the failure in his account in the form of a journal titled Of Plymouth Plantation [1647], observing that the system bred confusion, resentment, and idleness, “as if men were wiser than God.”
When each family was granted its own parcel of land, industry revived, harvests multiplied, and prosperity returned. In that moment, Plymouth discovered a truth as old as Scripture and as enduring as history: God owns, man stewards; ideas have consequences.
Former Ohio Congressman Bob McEwen echoes Bradford’s principle, saying, “You can make any place rich, and any place poor.” He points to the Korean peninsula as living proof: one people, one language, one culture, divided not by geography but by ideology.
North Korea embraced atheistic communism and descended into darkness. South Korea embraced freedom, private property, and faith, and now glows with prosperity visible from space. McEwen’s thesis is simple: prosperity is not a matter of luck or location; ideas have consequences.
This brings us to last Tuesday, November 4th, and the New York City election. Once the world’s symbol of free enterprise and moral energy, New York - one of the richest cities on earth - is now poised to test the failure of socialism anew with the election of Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani.
Mamdani’s governing philosophy of redistribution, identity politics, and state control repudiates the city’s spiritual and economic heritage. New York was built by Dutch merchants shaped by the Protestant Reformation, who believed that trade and truth were twin callings under God. The Dutch Reformed Church taught that honest commerce was a form of worship, that wealth carried moral responsibility, and that freedom demanded virtue.
Juxtaposed with Mayor-elect Mamdani’s campaign promises of replacing moral responsibility with bureaucratic entitlement and personal stewardship with collective dependency, New York is about to learn what Plymouth discovered in 1623, what South Korea proved in 1953, and what Mark Twain learned by trial and error: “If you hold a cat by the tail, you will learn things you cannot learn any other way.”
The record through recorded history is crystal clear: wherever socialism is implemented, where the state assumes ownership of production, redistributes wealth by coercion, and suppresses private enterprise, the outcome is always the same: poverty, repression, and decay. |
A United Methodist ‘pastor’ recently called Zohran Mamdani the most “Christ-like” politician and said he is building a “Christ-like government.” |
Former Congressman Bob McEwen counters her misuse of Scripture with piercing clarity: “I don’t need a book or even a chapter. I’ll take a verse - any verse in the Bible- that calls upon a politician to use the police powers of the state to take from one person and give it to another. It calls upon you and me, and the Church, to help the poor. Nowhere does it call upon government to do what God calls the Church to do.”
Which brings us back to the central truth that Ideas Have Consequences.
The late Milton Friedman [1912-2006], American economist, New York Times #1 bestselling author of Free to Choose, and winner of the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science, would be having a field day with Zohran Mamdani. Since we cannot say it better, we quote Dr. Friedman at length:
“The world runs on individuals pursuing their separate interests. The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus. Einstein didn’t construct his theory under orders from a bureaucrat; Henry Ford didn’t revolutionize the automobile industry that way.
“In the only cases in which the masses have escaped from the kind of grinding poverty that you’re talking about [Phil Donahue], the only cases in recorded history, where they have had capitalism and largely free trade - if you want to know where the masses are worst off, it’s exactly in the kinds of societies that depart from that.
“The record of history is absolutely crystal clear: there is no alternative way so far discovered of improving the lot of ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities unleashed by a free enterprise system.
“What does reward virtue? You think communist commissaries reward virtue? You think a Hitler rewards virtue? You think - if you’ll pardon me - American presidents reward virtue? Do they choose their appointees on the basis of virtue, or on the basis of political clout? Is it really true that political self-interest is nobler somehow than economic self-interest?”
And as for Mamdani, Friedman concluded pointedly: |
“You know, I think you’re taking a lot of things for granted. Just tell me - where in the world do you find these angels who are going to organize society for us? I don’t even trust you to do that.” Watch the full exchange here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQ0-cDKMS5M. |
Thankfully, Gideons and Rahabs, after the 20th-century idleness and quiescence, are entering the public square of America.
David Lane American Renewal Project |
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