Hat-tip to Blazing Cat Fur for the John Stossel column from Real Clear Politics. While I highly recommend my modest readership to give it a read, if you don’t have time to do so, perhaps due to the fact that you are celebrating Thanksgiving, here is a quote which sums it up.
…”So as it well appeared that famine must still ensue the next year also, if not some way prevented,” wrote Gov. William Bradford in his diary. The colonists, he said, “began to think how they might raise as much corn as they could, and obtain a better crop than they had done, that they might not still thus languish in misery. At length after much debate of things, (I) (with the advice of the chiefest among them) gave way that they should set corn every man for his own particular, and in that regard trust to themselves. And so assigned to every family a parcel of land.”
In other words, the people of Plymouth moved from socialism to private farming. The results were dramatic…
Even after being taught by the Native Americans how to survive in this new land, pilgrims were still starving because of the communal nature of the Plymouth colony. Why should young men work hard for someone else and not themselves? Why should those who were able-bodied not be able to benefit fairly from their own work? It was because of the privatization of the land and the incentives the pilgrims now had to work hard that there was not only a large harvest, but the first Thanksgiving that was celebrated in 1623.
Here’s the same story from Rush Limbaugh, via KingofdaWackos.
It doesn’t surprise me that the same history teachers who would teach their students to hate Thanksgiving would also omit the important economic lessons of the occasion. Long before Marxism and communes, the Plymouth Pilgrims found that such socialist policies did not work. Instead of accepting this lesson, they would prefer to erase it from history and pervert the meaning of this holiday to push their own political and social agenda.
Happy Thanksgiving to my American readership. Be thankful for the great food and you have and the company you share it with, but also the fact that more and more people are learning the lessons of the Plymouth Colony and are apply them to the hardships we face today.
UPDATE: Since when does the First Lady of the United States have to give Americans permission to have the tradition Thanksgiving pies? Both Hot Air’s Jimmie Bise, Jr and Doug Powers at Michelle Malkin’s blog are reporting on Michelle Obama’s dumbfounding comments. It seems that not even this American holiday is safe from the First Lady’s anti-obesity obsession.
While pies have been allowed, we don’t know whether or not a scoop of ice cream with with it is, or whether Americans will be permitted to have extra helpings. If the White House Thanksgiving menu is shows anything, it’s that Michelle Obama has no problem eating what she likes while dictating to everyone else what they are allow to have on their plates… Hypocrite…
