Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is quintessentially American and my most favorite of western holiday traditions. In a way, Thanksgiving is a more important holiday to Americans than even Christmas. It is historically significant because the modern version began here. I love it because it is centered around gratitude.

I am not the praying kind. Being a Hindu, I don’t have to pray since there’s no entity that demands or requires my prayers. But I do have a prayer that I engage in several times a day. Every now and then I take a break from things and remember that I have a lot of unearned good things. Things are hardly ever prefect but there’s always something that is good for which we ought to be grateful.

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You can read about Thanksgiving in America in the wiki. An edited bit follows:

Thanksgiving is a federal holiday in the United States celebrated on the fourth Thursday of November. It originated as a day of thanksgiving and harvest festival, with the theme of the holiday revolving around giving thanks and the centerpiece of Thanksgiving celebrations remaining a Thanksgiving dinner. Other Thanksgiving customs include charitable organizations offering thanksgiving dinner for the poor, attending religious services, and watching television events such as Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade and NFL football games.

New England and Virginia colonists originally celebrated days of fasting, as well as days of thanksgiving, thanking God for blessings such as harvests, ship landings, military victories, or the end of a drought. The event that Americans commonly call the “first Thanksgiving” was celebrated by the Pilgrims after their first harvest in the New World in November 1621. This feast lasted three days and was attended by 90 Native American Wampanoag people and 53 survivors of the Mayflower (Pilgrims).

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I had my first Thanksgiving dinner in a small town in Connecticut close to New Haven. It was my first year as a grad student at Rutgers University. My friend and I took a train from New Brunswick NJ to New Haven. We spent the long weekend at the home of his family friends. As it happened, it was the best Thanksgiving I have ever had. I am thankful.

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Now that I’m an economist, I appreciate what happened to the settlers in Plymouth colony over 400 years ago. They attempted collective farming. Let Lawrence Reed of FEE explain “Why the Pilgrims Abandoned Common Ownership for Private Property.”

In the diary of the colony’s first governor, William Bradford, we can read about the settlers’ initial arrangement: Land was held in common. Crops were brought to a common storehouse and distributed equally. For two years, every person had to work for everybody else (the community), not for themselves as individuals or families. Did they live happily ever after in this socialist utopia?

Hardly. The “common property” approach killed off about half the settlers. Governor Bradford recorded in his diary that everybody was happy to claim their equal share of production, but production only shrank. Slackers showed up late for work in the fields, and the hard workers resented it. It’s called “human nature.”

The disincentives of the socialist scheme bred impoverishment and conflict until, facing starvation and extinction, Bradford altered the system. He divided common property into private plots, and the new owners could produce what they wanted and then keep or trade it freely.

I am thankful for the ideas of private property, market exchange, and contracts. Without them, we would be much poorer.

That’s it for now. Have a great Thanksgiving Day. And remember to be grateful every day.

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Here’s a track from the album “Rivers of the Amazon” by the group Uakti and Philip Glass.