Aside from turkey induced comas and football, Thanksgiving is a time to reflect and account for all the things we can be thankful of.
It is also a time to reflect on how Thanksgiving came from a failed socialist experiment, and the turn towards liberty and property as the solution for prosperity. The Pilgrims began their colony from scratch and with ideological purity, as a collectivist commune:
“That’s how it is now, and that’s how it was in 1620. The charter of the Plymouth Colony reflected the most up-to-date economic, philosophical and religious thinking of the early 17th century. Plato was in vogue then, and Plato believed in central planning by intellectuals in the context of communal property, centralized state education, state centralized cultural offerings and communal family structure. For Plato, it literally did take a village to raise a child. This collectivist impulse reflected itself in various heretical offshoots of Protestant Christianity with names like The True Levelers, and the Diggers, mass movements of people who believed that property and income distinctions should be eliminated, that the wealthy should have their property expropriated and given to what we now call the 99%. This kind of thinking was rife in the 1600s and is perhaps why the Pilgrim settlers settled for a charter which did not create a private property system.”
After 2½ years of failure, our forefathers (be they by blood or adoption) turned away from the failure of failed philosophical musings, and towards private property and the free market:
“William Bradford, Governor of the Plymouth Colony, reports that, at that time, he and his advisers considered ‘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.’ And ‘after much debate of things,’ he then adds, they chose to abandon communal property, deciding that ‘they should set corn every man for his own particular’ and assign ‘to every family a parcel of land, according to the proportion of their number, for that end.'”
“The results, he tells us, were gratifying in the extreme, ‘for it made all hands very industrious’ and ‘much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been.’ Even ‘the women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn; which before would allege weakness and inability; whom to have compelled would have been thought great tyranny and oppression.'”
Much like the Pilgrims, the Occupy goons want to start afresh with a theoretical communal utopia. Unlike the Pilgrims, they are set on first needing to destroy Western Civilization to do it. Socialism did not work for the Pilgrim, will not work for the Occupy idjits, and never could work for anyone. Sadly, actual history is rarely taught in schools, with children learning nothing but how “capitalism” is oppression.
On a lighter note, here is a guide to talking politics at Thanksgiving dinner.
And now, a classic Turkey Television skit to enjoy before the turkey coma sets in:
One Response to Happy Thanksgiving for 2012!