Ron Paul Liberty Report - Things We Are Thankful For, Thanksgiving 2016
Aired: 2016-11-24
Duration: 07:11


=== A Grateful Heart (03:25) ===

[00:00:09]  Hello, everybody.
[00:00:11]  Thank you for tuning in and happy Thanksgiving.
[00:00:13]  This is a very special day for all of us.
[00:00:16]  And our co-host, as usual, is Daniel McAdams.
[00:00:18]  Daniel, happy Thanksgiving.
[00:00:20]  Happy Thanksgiving, Dr. Paul.
[00:00:21]  Happy Thanksgiving to all of you.
[00:00:23]  Wonderful.
[00:00:24]  You know, Daniel, I've told you before that Thanksgiving is a special day for me.
[00:00:28]  I like it.
[00:00:30]  It sort of avoids some of the gaudiness of what's going on with Christmas and others.
[00:00:35]  And those are important days.
[00:00:37]  But I've always liked Thanksgiving because I've always been a thankful person.
[00:00:40]  And in many ways, you know, I don't think we express our thankfulness as much because we spend a lot of time on this program trying to make things better.
[00:00:50]  Then we have to sort of complain about things.
[00:00:52]  And we never look at just the positive thing and tell us what we're thankful for.
[00:00:56]  But there are a lot of things to be thankful for.
[00:00:58]  For instance, you know, just in my lifetime, which is rather short, but I do remember a little bit about the Depression and World War II and Korean War in Vietnam and a lot of economic problems that were much worse even than we have here.
[00:01:13]  We, of course, worry about what the future will bring.
[00:01:16]  But, you know, compared to some of those things, I think we live in really pretty good times because, you know, in many ways, for a lot of people, standard living has gone up.
[00:01:26]  And, you know, the advancement of civilization is something.
[00:01:28]  When I think about my dad delivered milk and horse and buggies before automobiles, even when my dad passed away, he referred to automobiles as a machine.
[00:01:42]  There's a machine there.
[00:01:43]  He always called them a machine, but that's what they were when he remembered them coming in.
[00:01:48]  And he was born in 1904.
[00:01:50]  So just think of all the benefits we have.
[00:01:53]  And I think that me personally, I feel very blessed because of my family, my wife and my family, our kids, and family is very important.
[00:02:03]  And that's been very good.
[00:02:05]  But I personally feel very blessed in that I've had personal goals.
[00:02:11]  And one early goal was, of course, getting through medical school.
[00:02:15]  And to me, it was never an automatic.
[00:02:17]  I never felt like, you know, I'm the top person in the class.
[00:02:21]  I can go to any place I want.
[00:02:22]  But medical school came and I was able to do a part of medicine that I liked.
[00:02:28]  There were a lot of specialties you go into, but I sort of picked a happier branch.
[00:02:33]  Somebody told me once, it's the only branch of medicine where the patient goes home with something.
[00:02:38]  And other people, they might come in sick and they might go home with their health, but they don't get anything in addition.
[00:02:44]  But in OB, they get something, and you get more credit than you deserve.
[00:02:48]  So medicine's been great.
[00:02:50]  But then because I've been fascinated in ideas and understanding economics and thinking about politics, you know, I think politics sometimes is very lucky.
[00:02:59]  I didn't set out, this is my goal, I'm going to do this, but it was sort of guided in a direction of speaking out.
[00:03:06]  And I got to participate.
[00:03:09]  And I continue to participate in something that I really enjoyed, discussing the issue.
[00:03:14]  So I am very grateful for my family and what I've had throughout my life.
[00:03:20]  That's very nice.
[00:03:21]  You know, I feel the same way.
[00:03:22]  Thanksgiving was always a happy time in our family.
[00:03:25]  We always lived geographically close.
[00:03:28]  And so the family would all come over.
[00:03:30]  And we were a pretty loud family growing up.
[00:03:33]  And my grandfather's from Pittsburgh.

=== Grateful Traditions (03:35) ===

[00:03:35]  And so there'd be a lot of yelling for the Steelers if the game was on.
[00:03:38]  And there was another faction who liked the Raiders and the Raiders people and the Steelers people would yell at each other.
[00:03:43]  So it wasn't a quiet, harmonious gathering.
[00:03:46]  But I'm sure grateful for all those times.
[00:03:48]  You know, it's very important.
[00:03:50]  And I'm certainly very thankful for, you know, 12 or 13 wonderful years I've spent working for you and working with such a great group on Capitol Hill.
[00:03:58]  We're all still working together.
[00:04:00]  And, you know, your careers can be very fulfilling, especially if you do something that you really believe in.
[00:04:05]  And so I'm grateful to you for giving me that chance way back then when you had no idea who this guy was in your office.
[00:04:13]  Snuck in the back door.
[00:04:16]  Very good.
[00:04:17]  And I want to truly wish the viewers a very happy Thanksgiving.
[00:04:23]  But just for a minute, thinking about when did Thanksgiving start?
[00:04:27]  It's been around a long time, and there's no precise date that it was started.
[00:04:31]  It's been around, and a lot of people like to claim credit even before our colonies were started.
[00:04:38]  Other people in Texas claimed it started in Texas and the Spanish did it.
[00:04:43]  But it was always on the same principle: being thankful for the harvest and just surviving or just getting across the ocean.
[00:04:52]  They had Thanksgiving Day.
[00:04:54]  But there's one date that generally a lot of people think about, and that is around the time of 1620 with the Plymouth colony.
[00:05:02]  And the one thing I know, if Thanksgiving came from that date, it didn't come from 1620, probably from 1623 or so.
[00:05:10]  Because when the settlers came over and landed at Plymouth Colony, it was bad.
[00:05:15]  A lot of them died away over here, and after the first year, they were starving.
[00:05:19]  And another large number of people died.
[00:05:23]  And they had collectivism.
[00:05:25]  Everybody was supposed to work and put the food in one area, and then the food would be distributed.
[00:05:30]  It wasn't working.
[00:05:31]  The second year, the same way, and it wasn't working.
[00:05:34]  But Governor Bradford, then, in the third year, we have to do something different.
[00:05:40]  And he had this notion, because it did exist around the world, it existed in England.
[00:05:45]  We need to not think that the collectivism that we're using is the best way to take care of everybody.
[00:05:52]  Maybe we ought to look at this in a private property sense.
[00:05:56]  So they divided up the land and they had an agreement.
[00:05:59]  Each family would get a plot of land.
[00:06:02]  And lo and behold, a miracle happened.
[00:06:05]  You know, the families worked harder.
[00:06:07]  The wives worked.
[00:06:08]  The fathers worked.
[00:06:09]  The children worked.
[00:06:10]  Production went way up.
[00:06:11]  Everybody seemed to have enough food.
[00:06:13]  There was enough food for the people who couldn't work.
[00:06:16]  They were taken care of.
[00:06:17]  And the starvation just disappeared.
[00:06:22]  They weren't having it.
[00:06:23]  They weren't starving anymore.
[00:06:24]  Matter of fact, they were able to produce so much that they started trading and selling.
[00:06:28]  And it was the introduction of a free market economy.
[00:06:32]  So I would like to think that that time they were grateful for this, but I think what they were really grateful for was the rejection of collectivism and socialism and all this do-goodism and the welfare stuff.
[00:06:45]  It didn't work.
[00:06:46]  And individual property ownership actually was the answer to production and taking care of people and generosity.
[00:06:54]  More people were taken care of.
[00:06:56]  So that is what I like to think about the origin of Thanksgiving Day.
[00:07:02]  And there may be variations of that story, but of course, I think they were very grateful that the people were no longer starving.