On this date in history the Jamestown settlement burned down. As if they didn’t have enough problems already. Mind you it wasn’t much of a settlement back on January 7 of 1608. Basically a fort full of fools who didn’t know where they were, how to grow crops or almost anything else you’d want in the old tool kit if you were, say, moving to a new continent in the age of sail.

Be that as it may, there was a lot more there before the fort burned down than afterward. For instance a fort in which to take refuge if the locals attacked you because of something you had done like steal from them or lie to them or show up looking ominous, or just because they had a habit of attacking anyone handy. (Correct answer: all of the above; despite PC versions the first deadly aboriginal attack occurred within two weeks of their arrival.)

Undaunted, they rebuilt the fort and lounged about in it during the "starving time" in which nearly everybody died after eating boot soup (less from the quality of the boots than the insufficient quantity) and various expeditions from England brought more food and more fools. Indeed, just five days before the fire a ship showed up without enough food and 70 more mouths to feed.

Nevertheless John Smith did pull them through the worst of the crisis including abolishing socialism and discovering that people did more work if the benefits were fairly distributed, of all things. And Jamestown prospered and flourished and so did Virginia and then the United States with all its great virtues and some scary defects.

It remains amazing that such a ludicrous venture could in fact succeed despite everything from bad preparation if any to the hostility of the far more numerous locals to choosing a swamp as your ideal site to the worst drought in 700 years to carelessness with fire in your only building. As with many things in history, we should not take it for granted just because it did happen. Certainly if you’d been standing among the blackened timbers on January 7, 1608 you’d have been likely to say "OK, that’s it, I’ve had it, where’s the ship home?"

Only to be told it was one more thing we didn’t really think of.

"You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the industrious out of it. You don’t multiply wealth by dividing it. Government cannot give anything to anybody that it doesn’t first take from somebody else. Whenever somebody receives something without working for it, somebody else has to work for it without receiving. The worst thing that can happen to a nation is for half of the people to get the idea they don’t have to work because somebody else will work for them, and the other half to get the idea that it does no good to work because they don’t get to enjoy the fruit of their labor." Adrian Pierce Rogers in his 1996 Ten Secrets for a Successful Family (frequently misattributed online, incidentally)

In my latest National Post column I look back at the year now ending and say we can be more intelligent and decent in the next one.

Wrapping up 2016 and looking forward to 2017, a word of thanks to all those who made our documentary work possible in the past year.

I talk with Mark Sutcliffe about Iranian hostages and US presidental debates. Click here to listen.

In a commentary for Mercatornet I argue that if Hillary Clinton wins the election she may be so bad she'll actually have a beneficial purgative effect on American politics by forcing voters to reexamine themselves.

In my latest National Post column I say that while Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump loom horrifyingly larger, we should spare a little horror as U.S. President Barack Obama looms ever smaller.

The Washington Post reports, à propos of the lavish compensation Bill Clinton received as "honorary" chancellor of Laureate International Universities while his wife was coincidentally United States Secretary of State, that:

"In addition to his well-established career as a paid speaker, which began soon after he left the Oval Office, Bill Clinton took on new consulting work starting in 2009, at the same time Hillary Clinton assumed her post at the State Department. Laureate was the highest-paying client, but Bill Clinton signed contracts worth millions with GEMS Education, a secondary-education chain based in Dubai, as well as Shangri-La Industries and Wasserman Investment, two companies run by longtime Democratic donors. All told, with his consulting, writing and speaking fees, Bill Clinton was paid $65.4 million during Hillary Clinton’s four years as secretary of state."

The Post further notes that "The Laureate arrangement illustrates the extent to which the Clintons mixed their charitable work with their private and political lives."

Yeah. That's one way of putting it.