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Nov. 23, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
26:51
3509 What Pisses Me Off About Thanksgiving
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Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
Hey, happy Thanksgiving everyone.
I hope you have a wonderful time sitting around the groaning table provided to you by the remnants of the free market, having wonderful healing conversations and closing up recent political wounds with liberal applications of spatula-filled cranberry sauce.
But my Thanksgiving present to you is the following.
The history that has been robbed from you and stolen from you.
So let's talk a little bit about the kind of propaganda story you got today.
About Thanksgiving, I don't know, say from your government teacher.
So in this propaganda story, the pilgrims doth board the Mayflower, sail across the ocean blue and arrive in America.
And they set up the Plymouth Colony in the winter of 1620 to 1621.
Ah, as you have been told, the first winter was hard and long and cold.
And half the colonists die.
Four families wiped out completely.
Of the 18 wives brought over, only five survived.
Of 29 single men in this colony, hired hands, servants, only 10 were alive when spring finally came.
And then the Indians taught them how to farm well, and everything got better from there.
Now, common sense would give you the following question.
Let's just say you're smart enough to cross the Atlantic Ocean in the pretty much equivalent of a wooden bathtub.
Do you think you might pack a few extra provisions for the far side of it so you wouldn't say starve to death when you didn't really know how good the hunting was going to be where you were going?
I'm pretty sure you would.
So, do they not have enough food?
Do they not know how to farm?
These are smart people who are entrepreneurial and very adventurous and, of course, willing to sail across.
So why wouldn't they have enough food?
Why wouldn't they be able to figure out how to farm?
Huh.
Well, anyway, as the story goes on that your government teacher told you, for reasons we will get into in just a few minutes, those who survived that first hard winter, well, they were hardworking, they were tenacious, fearless, they worked together, the very salt of this very earth in the new world, and, um...
Of course, they introduced new farming techniques from the Indians.
Of course, the Indians, who for thousands of years had pretty much had starvation levels of food production, were able to come with magical headdresses and produce bounty in their dancing wake.
Then, the harvest of 1621.
It is fruitful and bountiful.
The earth doth bring forward fruits and vegetables, much like the Kardashians produce scandals and sex tapes.
All is well.
And the pilgrims doth sit around a table and give thanks to God and the Indians.
They are grateful for the wonderful new abundance that the land has provided them.
Good weather, good land.
Lord's sakes, we are delivered from the vagaries of bad luck.
And 1839, they decide to make it a holiday.
It's become a tradition.
Now, how much of this is true?
Well, none of it, including the words and and the.
Where should we start?
Okay.
First of all, the second harvest, no, no, not plentiful.
First winter, very, very tough.
Second harvest was not plentiful.
The colonists in Plymouth and Jamestown and other areas, which we'll talk about in a moment, no, no, not hardworking, not tenacious, not the very salt of the very, very earth.
They're not willing to go the extra mile to secure a steady supply of food.
They were, in fact...
Welfare bums.
Socialists, parasites, lazy, resentful, corrupt, thieves.
And this, of course, should have been the real lesson of the founding of, I guess, at least white America, of Plymouth Rock.
If we had learned the actual lessons of Thanksgiving.
Well, the West, America, perhaps even the whole world could have been kept free of, you know, minor irritants like war, mass starvation, democide, the murder of civilians by their own governments.
But no, no, we can't learn the real lessons of Thanksgiving because, oh, I guess we decided about 150 years ago to turn over the education of our children to the state!
So the state had to lie to the children about the state and about the very foundation of their country.
We live in a 1984 world where the party controls the information and the state controls the education of the children and therefore is going to lie.
You know, if Coke was running the education of the children, I'm not sure you'd hear a lot about the harmful effects of Coke.
But anyway...
So let's go to a little histoire, shall we?
A little history.
In his book, The History of Plymouth Plantation, this is the governor of the colony.
His name is William Bradford.
So he noted that, well, the colonists pretty much starved for years because they refused to work the land.
They refuse to work the land.
Seems kind of strange to me.
A little bit odd.
It's sort of like signing up for a summer of tree planting and then going, what, I have to plant trees?
I thought this was just like camping and gross sex and the ability to exchange body fluids and viruses.
No.
It seems kind of weird.
Go to a Chinese restaurant.
Hey, man.
Don't look now, but I think there's some Chinese food here.
Look out!
Duck and roll!
Duck and roll.
Actually, it probably would be Chinese.
Anyway.
Stay focused.
Stay back from the bad jokes.
It'll never happen.
But anyway.
So they refused to work the land.
Why would you go to a new country to be a farmer and refuse to work the land?
Hmm.
Seems a little odd.
Now, he complained that their preferred methodology of farming was theft.
Of course, if you want food, you either make food or you take food.
That's really not a lot of third options.
You've got to make something.
It's true, not just a food.
You want money.
You've got to make it or you've got to take it or, you know, someone's got to give it to you charitably or whatever.
So the governor of Plymouth reported or complained that the colony was riddled with corruption and confusion and discontent.
So what happened was they landed and one of the first things they built was a big storehouse.
And this is where they put their crops.
But...
I guess in retail they call it shrinkage, which is also when it's cold.
But the crop stores just vanished.
Because, according to the governor, much was stolen both by night and day.
Before, it became scarce edible.
Eatable, sorry.
Edible, eatable.
Edible complex?
Anyway.
So, yeah.
They put all this stuff, all the food went into this common area, and it got stolen.
So, this very first Thanksgiving meal...
It wasn't really a celebration because they were running out of food.
It was kind of like, you know how you're condemned to death, you get a last meal?
It was kind of like that.
So 1622, mad.
Early in 1623, half starving, stuffing their faces with stolen corn, full in their bellies but fearful in their hearts, Awaiting this slow winter decline towards starvation, you know.
I mean, real starvation.
Not like, oh, my blood sugar's running a little low.
But like you're chewing on tree bark and pillow feathers and pets and those who've starved before you, wishing they just had a little bit more meat on their bones.
By April 1623, this is in the spring, almost all their provisions are gone.
And...
They're stepping over the anorexic concentration camp-style bodies of those who starve to death over the winter.
And it's horrendous.
I mean, unbelievable, god-awful, terrifying, terrible situation.
So by spring 1623, they say, wow, unless we can improve our harvest, food production this year in any way, shape, or form, we're all going to die.
And this isn't one of these, we're all going to die, chicken.
Like, this is like, literally, you're all going to die.
Now, what's weird is that between the spring and the winter of 1623, the winter rolling 1623, 1624, something has magically changed.
It's a Christmas miracle!
There's enough food, and they never really run out of food again.
So from starving and losing half their people and almost two-thirds of their wives, they suddenly have enough food.
How is that possible?
Was it just, well, there was a bad winter or two, but then the weather got better for a couple of hundred years?
No, it wasn't that case at all.
Global warming hadn't kicked in yet, so you can't get the extra CO2 to grow your corn.
So, this turnaround from, like, starving to death, dying en masse...
To plenty.
You think that'd be kind of an important lesson?
You know, something you kind of want to focus and study and teach about and learn about?
Because Bradford, right, the governor, reported something quite remarkable.
He wrote,"...instead of famine, now God gave them plenty, and the face of things was changed to the rejoicing of the hearts of many, for which they blessed God." After 1624, he wrote,"...any general want or famine hath not been amongst them since to this day." In fact, in 1624, the colonists grew so much corn, right?
They were starving to death in 1624.
They had so much corn, they actually began to export it.
Export it, sell it to others.
Bradford wrote, they began to think how much they might raise, oh sorry, 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.
He said, this had very good success, for it made all hands very industrious.
So, as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been by any means, the governor or any other could use, and saved him a great deal of trouble and gave far better content, 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, right?
So suddenly, 1624, it's weird.
The women who before were like, I'm too tired to go plant some corn and I can't touch anything so phallic.
I made up that last part.
But now they're willingly going out.
I have children.
I'll be breastfeeding.
I'll be a giant mothership of mother milk, and therefore I can't go out.
I don't know where the accident is.
I can't go out into the field because I'll be dripping.
Maybe that's how I find my way back home if it's dry, but I can't go out.
And now they're going out into the field with their babies and they're planting corn and their toddlers are planting corn.
Oh, something changed.
From starving to hard prosperous work, from not having enough corn to eat to having more than you need and can export some.
Now Bradford said, for this community of property, which was found to breed much confusion and discontentment and retard much employment, that would have been to their benefit and comfort.
Community of property?
What could he be talking about?
And what lessons might it hold for us today?
So after 1622, you know, it takes a lot to peel people away from their ideology.
But I think certain starvation and watching people to the left and right of you drop like flies on a hot day, well, they began to question after 1622 the wisdom of their...
Economic organization.
I mean, that's a pretty mild way of putting...
See, what they had done when they landed in Plymouth Rock, this is how they pretended that things could work.
This is how they lurped as people who wanted to survive.
In the colony, all...
This is from Bradford.
All profits and benefits that are got by trade, traffic, trucking, working, fishing, or any other means...
We're handed over to the common stock of the colony.
You make something, you hand it over, and it goes into that big giant storehouse.
How interesting.
What a fascinating, fascinating story.
So you hand over all of this stuff, and as Bradford described it, all such persons are, as of this colony, are to have their meat, drink, apparel, and all provisions out of the common stock.
Ah.
Isn't that interesting?
Does that seem at all familiar to anyone in the here and now?
How interesting.
You make or you produce a whole bunch of stuff, you hand it over to the government, and the government puts it in a big storehouse, and then they hand it out to whoever they deem the most needs it.
Everything.
You work, you sweat, you work so hard to produce.
Hand it over!
Central authorities!
And then they redistribute your food and money and goods and clothing to those they considered the most needy.
I guess in return for votes, one can only assume.
Bradford wrote about the system.
The young men did repine.
That means complain.
The young men did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men's wives and children without any recompense.
This was thought injustice.
And the men's wives, to be commanded to do service for other men, as dressing their meat, washing their clothes, etc., they deemed it a kind of slavery.
And a lot of historians, not the ones you've ever heard of, historians have noted that this kind of resentment about being forced to take care of other people led to laziness, envy, thievery, rampant sloth, you know, a ton of other vices throughout the colony.
This is not that complicated to figure out.
I invite you to look at a different kind of Marxism, that's M-A-R-K, like the marks you get at school, Marxism.
Let's say that the kids who study for the test and do well and practice Well, all of the marks of everyone in the class gets put into a common pool, and then they get redistributed out to everyone else based upon, you know, how much they need the marks.
So those who don't study get the marks of those who do study, and how's that going to work?
And we all know what's going to happen if that's the case.
Like, if you study, your marks are going to get taken away from you, and if you don't study, marks are going to get given to you, and so how many people are going to To study?
Well, no.
They would rather sit there and say, I hit my head, and the dog ate my homework, and I couldn't study.
It was noisy.
It was loud.
There were sirens.
I couldn't study.
And therefore, I need somebody else's marks.
And then there are no marks to hand out, which is one thing, you know.
You don't get marks.
You don't eat them.
You don't need them to live.
But if it's food, bread, corn, that which you need to survive, well, you're going to have a pretty big problem.
So...
This is the socialist welfare state.
This is America was founded as a socialist welfare state.
And immediately, instant starvation was the order of the day.
So the socialist welfare state, like, it's all collectivism.
It's all communistic, fundamentally, you know, the old Marxist doctrine.
From each according to their ability, to each according to their need.
I mean, it kills productivity, it kills motivation, energy, effort.
And people addicted to this ideology literally preferred to die rather than do something sensible, like get rid of collective communal ownership, which is non-ownership, and establish clear and consistent property rights.
Well, they did after more than half of them starved to death.
Okay, well, let's honor the dead by changing the system that produced the dead so that we can all live and survive and thrive.
So again, this is back to Bradford, the governor's history.
Quote, Young men that were most able and fit for labor and service, resented being forced to, spend their time and strength to work for other men's wives and children.
Also, the strong or man of parts had no more in division of victuals and clothes than he that was weak.
So the young and the strong and those the most ambitious and the most able refused to work.
And so everybody had their hand in the pot, and nobody was filling the pot, and they got a whole lot of air sandwich and death.
And the young and the strong refused to work.
Food production collapsed.
Gosh, I wonder if we could see this anywhere else in society.
I don't know.
Maybe it'll come.
So the healthy and the hard-working, well, they're the hosts, and everyone expects them to keep working.
And so there weren't a lot of old and infirm people among the colonists.
Hint, if you're old and infirm, you don't really want to sail across the Atlantic in the aforementioned equivalent of a wooden bathtub.
And so, yeah, they expect the young and the healthy to continue working, and they expect to prey upon them as parasites prey upon a host no matter what.
Now, what's fascinating, what was so instructive about the American founding, America's founding as a communist slash socialist predatory pseudo-economy, is that the starvation set in right away.
Why?
Well, they didn't have a bunch of money in the bank.
They didn't have, you know, massive Federal Reserve printing presses to create money out of thin air.
They couldn't engage or indulge in national debt.
They couldn't sell bonds that were redeemable 75 years in the future to buy votes in the here and now.
So what happened is, rather than being spread out over time, the consequences accrued immediately.
Like if you're a real athlete in high school and then you kind of go to seed, it takes a while for you to become unhealthy because you've got a lot of stored up health in your system.
But yeah, if you're not, right?
This is socialism on fast forward.
We're on socialism in slow motion.
The end result is the same.
You can just look at Venezuela at the moment and we've got a presentation on Venezuela on this very channel, which you should check out.
But yeah.
So what happened was they began all starving to death, and they knew that the next winter was going to be their last.
Now, what happened was eventually, I don't know, maybe perhaps they had a significant shortage of, you know, modern arts degrees and mainstream media propaganda.
What happened eventually was Governor Bradford ended socialism and established a free market.
So rather than just saying, hey, whatever you make, we're going to scoop up and I'm going to hand it out as I see fit, what they did was each household then received a parcel of land.
And now, golly gee, you get to keep whatever you produce.
You can give it away.
You can trade it away as you see fit yourselves.
Ooh, they went from collective non-ownership, political manipulation of productivity that you did not earn but would like to hand out.
They went from that to private property and a free market of trade and energy.
And suddenly, oh, it's a kind of magic.
Though it seems like magic, it's just basic morality and reality, the famine ceased and food was never really a problem again.
And thus it was that adulthood, moral responsibility, finally came to the colonies.
True, reality and adulthood did climb over a veritable mountain of half-starved bodies like a bunch of dead socialism-fell pickup sticks, but hey, better late than never, right?
And at least it never got confused and left the colonies again.
So nearly all of the early colonial communities were socialistic in this kind of way, and they all starved and died in the same way.
So Jamestown was established a little earlier, 1607.
More than half of the settlers died by socialists in their first year in America.
In Jamestown, the vast majority of the work was being done by only 20% or one-fifth of the men.
The other 80% chose to be parasites.
The winter in Jamestown, the winter of 1609 to 1610, was called The Starving Time.
The population fell, are you ready, fell from 500 down to 60.
And this, I assume, would provoke the only really horrifying experiment in cannibalism in the New World, at least up until spirit cooking dinners.
But yeah, can you imagine what a horrendous thing this was?
Starving to death.
It's not a pretty way to go, right?
You know the rule of threes.
You can do three minutes without air, three days without water, three weeks without food, but it is an ugly, ugly way to go.
Just ask millions of Chinese under Mao, the collectivization of farmland, or the Ola Domira, which was the Ukraine being starved to death by Stalin's collectivized farming.
It is brutal.
So yes, when you have lost...
Close to 90% of your colony to starvation.
I guess that's just about enough to say, maybe we should give the free market just a little try.
And they did.
They get rid of this collective ownership, and they gave everyone their own plots of land, and you could keep your own property that you'd earned, and lo and behold, the starvation and cannibalism doth end it.
See, this is what happens.
First, you cannibalize other people's productivity, and then you cannibalize them directly, i.e.
you eat their tiny shrunken spleens.
And just like Plymouth, right, as soon as they put in free market private property, Jamestown improved.
In 1614, Colony Secretary Ralph Hammer reported that after socialism was abolished, there was, quote,"...plenty of food, which every man by his own industry may easily and doth procure." Under socialism, he said, we reaped not so much corn from the labors of 30 men as three men have done for themselves now.
Right?
So, hmm.
90% death rate under socialism, 10 times the productivity under capitalism.
Hmm.
That's really, really quite interesting.
Don't you think?
Quite an interesting ratio.
So why, I don't know, all of the...
etymology of why they had this particular socialist nightmare beliefs, but This collective property stuff is begged for by people who want to have power over you, right?
Because if you have to surrender your property to people, to political leaders, then they get to decide whether you get the property back or other people's property or whatever.
And this is just the natural thing.
Power seekers will always try to socialize your property.
They'll always want more taxes.
They'll always want more regulations, more control over you, so that they can grant you favors called food, which you actually earn, but which they get to actually distribute.
So...
That's just a typical way to destroy an economy.
You know, pretty easy to do if you want to destroy the West or any society.
Just promise endless programs like social programs, government spending programs that need to be paid for by the young and then convince the native population to stop having kids.
Hey, I guess we're going to run out of money soon.
So for what should we give thanks?
From starvation to plenty.
What is thanksgiving for?
Before they established private property and free markets, what did the colonists have to be thankful for?
After free markets were established, the abundance they got, ten times the production, was so dramatic that these annual Thanksgiving celebrations became like common throughout the colonies and in 1863 Thanksgiving became a national holiday.
So what are you giving thanks for this Thanksgiving?
Well, The reason you have tables, the reason you have houses, the reason you have heating, the reason you have water, the reason you have turkeys on the table, the reason you have wine is the remnants of the free market.
That's what Thanksgiving...
Thank you, Lord, for giving us freedom!
Because All your freedoms depend upon economic freedom.
All of your freedoms depend on economic freedom.
If you want freedom of the press, people have to be able to privately own the press, right?
I mean, all of your freedoms fundamentally depend on economic freedoms.
And this of course is not told to you, of course, right?
because we've used the same methodology that the Plymouth and Jamestown colonists used to starve their citizens.
We've used that same methodology to starve the minds of our children by stuffing them into useless, predatory, Democrat-loving, Democrat-controlled government schools, where leftist indoctrination and a complete antithesis of rational thought is imprinted and branded upon the squalling, dying minds of the children, where leftist indoctrination and a complete antithesis of rational thought is imprinted and branded upon the squalling, dying minds of the children, the boys of whom are drugged at a substantial ratio relative to the girls because boys Than the ladies in general.
And so, of course government teachers aren't going to teach you the truth about Thanksgiving.
Well, you see, when the government controlled stuff, it was really terrible.
But as soon as the free market controlled stuff, it was fantastic.
And this is what I'm telling you in a government school.
Of course they can't.
The whole reality of Thanksgiving, what it actually represents is thank God for the free market.
It's got to be scrubbed from history.
The Indians were nice, and apparently they've been nice for the last 400 years, because now the only problem the poor have in America is obesity.
So this is what I sort of want to point out when it comes to Thanksgiving.
What is it all about?
The thanks should be given to the free market, to laissez-nous faire.
Leave us be.
Leave us alone.
Get out of the way.
Let us trade.
Stop taking our stuff, handing it back to us, and calling yourself generous.
You know, I'm trying to get you to wake up.
Eating turkey is going to make you sleepy.
I'm trying to get you to wake up.
You say, oh, what about the poor?
Oh, come on.
The most economically free countries are statistically the most charitable countries.
When you have stuff, you give stuff.
So you're going to be sitting around the table and you're going to be looking at everyone.
You'll be digging into your turkey, wondering what to do with all the excess stuffing and why you can't eat it with anything except turkey.
It's kind of a basic reality.
You're going to be sitting around this table, a groaning table of near infinite plenty.
And for what do you give thanks?
Well...
If you believe the propaganda, then you're just livestock eating livestock.
If you recognize the truth that what we must be giving thanks for is those who have promoted free market principles, private ownership, private property, trade.
That is what we must give thanks for because that's the only reason we have plenty.
And yes, there'll be a bunch of lefties and socialists and all that sitting around the table.
And if they have their way...
Not too long in the future.
You won't be picking up the sauce and looking at the turkey.
Oh, you'll be looking at each other.
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