On Thanksgiving, Rand Paul (R-KY) took to social media to wish fellow Americans a happy Thanksgiving, and in the same message, said not to forget the origin of the said holiday.
In the tweet that he sent out on Nov. 28, he wrote, “Happy Thanksgiving! Take this day to be thankful for friends and family and don’t forget the first Thanksgiving only happened when the pilgrims rejected socialism.”
In the same tweet, he offered a link to a website that described the origins of the holiday. The article talked about Thanksgiving and its history going back almost 400 years ago to the time of its creation. In the commentary from the Foundation for Economic Education, Lawrence W. Reed writes about the very first Thanksgiving was about how socialism, and how the society’s common property approach to land distribution had turned into a disaster.
Happy Thanksgiving! Take this day to be thankful for friends and family and don’t forget the first Thanksgiving only happened when the pilgrims rejected socialism.
Why the Pilgrims Abandoned Common Ownership for Private Property https://t.co/93bFlH5Y5B
— Senator Rand Paul (@RandPaul) November 28, 2019
The basis of the society at the time was: “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.”
Reed then answered a question that people wondered—did the people live happily ever after, amidst this “socialist utopia” that was common property?
“Hardly,” Reed wrote. “The ‘common property’ approach killed off about half the settlers.”
Reed explained in the article that as William Bradford, the first governor wrote that although people agreed happily to claim their share of the production, it still shrank. The workers that slacked off didn’t come to work on time, and the hardworking people despised the slackers for it.
Until Bradford changed the system, people suffered under this “socialist” system, facing starvation and extinction. And Bradford did change the system—which was to divide up the shared property into private property, and people who owned the land after that were able to produce whatever they liked to, and then decide whether they wanted to trade off their products or to keep it to themselves.
“Communal socialist failure was transformed into private property/capitalist success, something that’s happened so often historically it’s almost monotonous. The ‘people over profits’ mentality produced fewer people until profit—earned as a result of one’s care for his own property and his desire for improvement—saved the people,” the article read.
The article also called on people to understand their history, and understand where this idea of being thankful came from. Reed wrote that countries like North Korea and Venezuela didn’t have these Thanksgiving days and Thanksgiving dinners—”there won’t be anything like widespread Thanksgiving dinners in either country this week, and that’s no coincidence.
“I’ll be offering gratitude for more than just good food on Thanksgiving Day. I’m going to give a prayerful thanks for private property and the profit motive that has made abundance possible.”
And Thanksgiving 2020 will mark the 400th year since Thanksgiving was created. It will also mark the 400th year since the Pilgrims—also known as the “Plymouth colony by English Separatists”—went down in history as the founders of Thanksgiving.
