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Nov. 25, 2016 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
12:54
Myth-Busters: Thanksgiving - What you're not supposed to know

There's an economic aspect to Thanksgiving that you're not supposed to know. Ron Paul's Myth-Busters gives this important history some life. There's an economic aspect to Thanksgiving that you're not supposed to know. Ron Paul's Myth-Busters gives this important history some life.

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The First Thanksgiving Myth 00:07:53
Hello, everybody.
Thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With me today as co-host is Chris Rossini.
He is also the editor of the Ron Paul LibertyReport.com, and this is the day we do mythbusters.
Chris, nice to have you on the program today.
Great to be with you, Dr. Paul.
Good.
What kind of myths are we going to burst wide open today?
What's our subject?
Well, since it's Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, we're going to speak about Thanksgiving, but from a different angle.
We'll talk about the first Thanksgiving.
And I remember when I first read about this, it was nothing like I've ever heard before.
And so we'll go back to the early 1600s and the Pilgrims.
And originally, they followed a early form of communism.
It was called farming in common.
And that may be shocking to a few people to hear that communism in early America, but that's how it was.
And as a result, many, many starved.
So can you please talk about why farming in common or anything in common by force always tends to lead to poverty and starvation?
Well, it's because collectivism doesn't work.
It doesn't work for a lot of reasons.
But this is one thing that we should have all learned, certainly in the 20th century.
But back at the time of the founding of the country, it was still up for grabs.
There was still a lot of collectivism going on.
But private property has been known for a long time throughout all history.
People knew that they had private property.
Even back as far as the Ten Commandments, I shall not kill, meant people owned things.
But it was a lot of ups and downs.
But certainly the early colonists, when they came over, in particular, what we'll talk about is in Plymouth Colony.
They came over and they felt like this was a special condition.
They had just spent all this time on the uncertainties of crossing the ocean, that they had to be extremely cautious and make sure that the most people could be taken care of.
And therefore, they designed this program.
The man of the household would go to work and he would produce and everybody would put whatever they produced into the common bin and then it would be distributed by the local government and that is probably the governor.
And lo and behold, the suffering that happened that first year on the ship over and then difficulty in getting their crops going, a lot of people, more than half of them, had already starved to death.
But it didn't get much better.
The first and second year was terrible.
They kept dying off.
There was always a need for food.
And finally, Bradford, the governor, said, you know, we're going to try something new in this third year in 1623.
He says, each family is going to get a plot of land.
And lo and behold, a miracle happened, the miracle of property and freedom.
And they were so surprised and shocked, they shouldn't have been, that the incentives automatically changed.
And all of a sudden, families went to work, the wives went to work, the kids went to work, and productivity came back and the starvation stopped.
And those people that were unable to work were generously taken care of because there was prosperity and there wasn't this fighting over who's going to do the work and who are going to get the result.
So it is indeed a very important lesson that was learned very early on.
And, you know, in a way, that message was carried on in our early history, never in a perfect manner, but property ownership and incentives and responsibility.
This sort of carried the day.
But it was proof that government mandates and the government distribution of food and wealth doesn't work because, of course, they don't know what the best thing is to do because politicians aren't necessarily smarter than individuals.
Individuals are the ones who are the smartest.
And this to them was a very important message, but unfortunately, it's been back and forth.
Even to the day, today, we have candidates running as socialists.
Next, Dr. Paul, I'm going to read a quote from Governor William Bradford because he did keep notes back then.
And he reported on the success that they had once they allowed free enterprise to flourish.
And he said, this had very good success, for it made all hands industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been.
So, Dr. Paul, can you please talk about free enterprise and the power that it unleashes once it's allowed to exist?
Yeah, and I think what the governor was talking about was rather profound because he was expressing in a realistic way the results of adhering to some basic principles of what freedom should, how freedom should work.
And that is free markets and incentives and private property ownership.
And that things should be done in a voluntary way, not in a coercive way.
It also represents the idea of individualism.
Individuals make decisions rather than a collective because nobody can know what is best for each and every individual.
The collectivism that they followed was well motivated.
They thought that was the best way to take care of the people in the colony under very difficult times.
But it turned out that the more difficult times are, the more necessary it is to have free markets.
I always complain about what has happened during wartime because they would say, well, there's a scarcity of products and therefore we have to ration and regulate.
And yet, when there is a scarcity, that's when you really don't need the government involvement.
You need to have these free choices.
And this also introduces the notion of labor, you know, the labor theory of value that people thought at one time it was only the labor and it isn't.
It's the people who want things and make these decisions.
But the division of labor is very important.
Some people do one thing.
Some people might want to raise one crop.
Somebody raise another crop.
Somebody might want to make clothes.
And all of a sudden, if there's more prosperity, people can start trading.
And, of course, if they do that, then they're going to need a sound money.
And that was necessary.
But if you want efficiency, you have to have this understanding of how the markets work.
You can't be afraid of having profits.
You can't be afraid of somebody who said, well, I'm self-reliant and I have self-interest.
Well, that's okay.
That doesn't mean you have to be a mean, nasty guy that won't take care of your family and help people who are in need.
But self-reliance and self-determination and self-interest is there's nothing wrong with that because it is under those conditions that you create prosperity.
When you have the prosperity, guess what?
There's more generosity that goes into it.
So this answers so many problems.
And this is what happened in those early years in 1823 when they switched.
All of a sudden, they ignited these natural things to come about by just recognizing private property and incentives and responsibility and no child labor laws, no child labor laws were permitted.
Because if you were little and small, and as I remember, my dad had me doing things when I was five years old.
But under these conditions, it wasn't like, oh, more kids, unemployment's going up.
No, it made more prosperity and there was more incentives.
So it was a major lesson, and fortunately, many of the colonies learned from that, and they accepted some of these free market principles.
Thanksgiving for Freedom 00:04:51
Yes, and here's the best part of the story, and that leads us to Thanksgiving.
With the failure of the ideas of socialism, communism, and the success of private property and free enterprise, in 1623, the pilgrims, and this is quoted from Bradford again, set apart a day of Thanksgiving.
Bradford said that any general want or famine had not been amongst them since to this day.
When I first saw that and finally understood the meaning of Thanksgiving, it made me wonder why all these years have I never heard this story?
What's in it, Dr. Paul?
Why was it thrown down the memory hole?
Why doesn't government, especially our government, want us to know this key economic lesson?
Well, they don't want us to learn it because there's a few people always in society that think that their role in the world is to be the boss and tell everybody else what to do.
Some are well motivated, thinking people won't take care of themselves.
Others just live and die to have power and authority, and that's what makes dictators.
But it's something that always has to be challenged.
It's happened throughout all of history.
And the conditions, when they get bad, you have even more come forth.
Well, I know the answers, and I will do it.
I mean, when you think of what happened in the 20th century, the authoritarianism, communism, and fascism and Nazism, all these things just made things that much worse.
But the neat thing about this is that it was a Thanksgiving for freedom and survival.
People were able to eat again, and they felt so much better about it.
That, to me, was the wonderful thing about it.
But to me, it also reminded me of the conditions that caused starvation in the 20th century.
The most massive starvation was done deliberately.
It was genocidal by the Soviets.
Seven million people, the Kulaks, that had this inclination that they should own their own little farms.
They were poor people and middle-class people, and yet the authoritarians said you had to destroy them because they're a threat to the bosses and the communism, to their theories.
So they purposely allowed seven million of them to die from starvation.
And that should be a powerful message that the 20th century should look at that carefully.
Communism has failed.
It disappeared, and the Soviet system did.
That is why we have a major task to get the information out to people and explain that it's freedom and liberty and private property and volunteerism and free trade and sound money.
This is what takes care of people.
So if anybody cares about the common man, if anybody has a populist instinct to help the maximum number of people, they have to believe in liberty.
They can't say that what we need is a better dictator.
We need somebody who knows how to organize, a better business manager.
That stuff doesn't work.
What you want is liberty, people making up their own minds.
You have to have a government if it's to be designed mainly to protect liberty and protect property, ownership of property, protect volunteerism and protect private choices.
Then that is when you get the prosperity.
And then it cancels out the authoritarians.
And that should be the goal of the authoritarians who will deliberately kill people.
And here, here we live in a time, even in this century already.
We have killed, our country has killed and bombed a lot of people for doing good.
Or we have to do good.
We have to kill this group of people and bomb and take them over and have reforms and spread our American exceptionalism.
That we can't be thankful for.
But we can be thankful that we still have an opportunity to spread the message of freedom and liberty and prosperity.
And that's what America has always been about.
That is what made American exceptional.
That was the lesson that was learned so clearly in 18, in 1623, that freedom does work.
And if you want freedom and prosperity, that's the way we should go.
And we should give up on this idea of the collectivism and authoritarianism.
And that we should all be thankful that we can look at this and say, you know, the rule that we should be following is called the non-aggression principle, that no man, no woman, no person can use aggression against another to have their way, and government shouldn't be able to do that either.
When that comes about, believe me, the world will be very thankful for the prosperity and the peace that would ensue.
Chris, I want to thank you very much for being with us today on MythBusters.
Thank you very much, Dr. Cole.
And I want to thank all the viewers for being with us today for this program.
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