I'll concede the analogy that the pact saying that all the food harvested gets put into a general store and each colonist gets an equal percentage of said store is a socialist type of idea. But the jump that the colonists all died because of said pact is a bit much of a leap. For the very simple reason that follows: the Pilgrims left the England in September, and finally settled on shore in November; when do you think they actually planted and harvested anything?

I'm not saying that the capitalized system didn't work better, it obviously did, but to claim that the colonists died because of socialism is a mistake, they died because they left England with too little supplies and much too late in the year, at a point when they could not actually farm anything.

The idea that their original charter had anything to do with the deaths is ridiculous, for several reasons:

1. They didn't start the colony in November. They went ashore briefly on several occasions, but they spent the entire winter on the ship. They left the ship to build the colony in March.

2. They replaced their original contract (which was only valid in Virginia territory) with the Mayflower Compact on the very day they first arrived, November 11 (Nov. 21 on a modern calendar), so to blame anything that happened on a contract they never actually followed is a bit ludicrous.

3. The main reason they died was that they arrived months later and considerably farther north than planned. Late November is not an auspicious time to begin a colony.

4. The actual causes of death were primarily scurvy, tuberculosis, and pneumonia, and nobody (however ruggedly capitalist) could make food grow in the winter, nor could they prevent the spread of bacterial disease through a population that's in such a confined area. It would be centuries before antibiotics were developed (which were first funded, by the way, by academia & the government -- none of the people involved in making penicillin made a dime off their work).