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Happy Holidays! (Reprise)
With Thanksgiving and the month-long “holiday season” of December fast approaching, it’s time to revisit some past essays on the significance of the holidays.
Part I
Thanksgiving: Celebrating the Producers
As I noted last year (“Celebrating Thanksgiving,” Nov. 21, 2006), Thanksgiving is in many ways the most American of holidays. Persons of religious faith may consider it a time to thank God for their “blessings,” but it’s not some hypothetical supernatural being that’s responsible for the material abundance that most Americans celebrate. It’s the American capitalist system – the free-market system that not only has made our society prosperous but also has made each of us free (and self-responsible), at least as far as it goes in the modern “mixed economy” of part-capitalism, part-socialistic governmental controls. That’s why, properly speaking, Thanksgiving ought to be considered a time to thank the productive people in our society – the people whose achievements have made life in modern civilized society possible – for the blessings they have given us, by their hard work, their superlative skills, and their ability to freely trade their achievements with other productive persons. Other special-interest groups have U.S. holidays – labor unions have Labor Day, military veterans have Veterans Day and Memorial Day, politicians have “Presidents Day” – but Thanksgiving truly ought to belong to America’s producers, the men and women of achievement, who are typically the “forgotten” individuals in American politics (although they’re the ones who pay the vast majority of taxes that fund the operations of government). As I also noted last year, philosopher/novelist Ayn Rand summed it up quite nicely in an essay she wrote in The Ayn Rand Letter in the early 1970s: “Thanksgiving is a typically American holiday. In spite of its religious form (giving thanks to God for a good harvest), its essential, secular meaning is a celebration of successful production. It is a producers’ holiday. The lavish meal is a symbol of the fact that abundant consumption is the result and reward of production. Abundance is (or was and ought to be) America’s pride – just as it is the pride of American parents that their children need never know starvation.”
(emphasis in original). Last year’s essay also told the story of the myth of the “First Thanksgiving,” presumably celebrated by the Pilgrim settlers at Plymouth. As I noted, the lesson to be learned from the real historical experience of the Plymouth settlers during their disastrous first year in 1620-21– how their utopian communist system of landholding nearly killed them all by starvation, but they recovered and found they had something really to celebrate when they discovered the importance of private property – reminds us that capitalism is not only the best (economically speaking) but also the only moral system for organizing society.
| Link to this Entry | Posted Tuesday, November 20, 2007 | Copyright © David N. Mayer |
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