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Religion
See other Religion Articles

Title: The Great Thanksgiving Hoax
Source: lew rockwell
URL Source: http://www.mises.org/story/336
Published: Nov 24, 2005
Author: by Richard J. Maybury
Post Date: 2005-11-24 08:55:54 by DeaconBenjamin
Keywords: Thanksgiving, Great, Hoax
Views: 126
Comments: 4

Each year at this time school children all over America are taught the official Thanksgiving story, and newspapers, radio, TV, and magazines devote vast amounts of time and space to it. It is all very colorful and fascinating.

It is also very deceiving. This official story is nothing like what really happened. It is a fairy tale, a whitewashed and sanitized collection of half-truths which divert attention away from Thanksgiving's real meaning.

The official story has the pilgrims boarding the Mayflower, coming to America and establishing the Plymouth colony in the winter of 1620-21. This first winter is hard, and half the colonists die. But the survivors are hard working and tenacious, and they learn new farming techniques from the Indians. The harvest of 1621 is bountiful. The Pilgrims hold a celebration, and give thanks to God. They are grateful for the wonderful new abundant land He has given them.

The official story then has the Pilgrims living more or less happily ever after, each year repeating the first Thanksgiving. Other early colonies also have hard times at first, but they soon prosper and adopt the annual tradition of giving thanks for this prosperous new land called America.

The problem with this official story is that the harvest of 1621 was not bountiful, nor were the colonists hardworking or tenacious. 1621 was a famine year and many of the colonists were lazy thieves.

In his 'History of Plymouth Plantation,' the governor of the colony, William Bradford, reported that the colonists went hungry for years, because they refused to work in the fields. They preferred instead to steal food. He says the colony was riddled with "corruption," and with "confusion and discontent." The crops were small because "much was stolen both by night and day, before it became scarce eatable."

In the harvest feasts of 1621 and 1622, "all had their hungry bellies filled," but only briefly. The prevailing condition during those years was not the abundance the official story claims, it was famine and death. The first "Thanksgiving" was not so much a celebration as it was the last meal of condemned men.

But in subsequent years something changes. The harvest of 1623 was different. Suddenly, "instead of famine now God gave them plenty," Bradford wrote, "and the face of things was changed, to the rejoicing of the hearts of many, for which they blessed God." Thereafter, he wrote, "any general want or famine hath not been amongst them since to this day." In fact, in 1624, so much food was produced that the colonists were able to begin exporting corn.

What happened?

After the poor harvest of 1622, writes Bradford, "they began to think how they might raise as much corn as they could, and obtain a better crop." They began to question their form of economic organization.

This had required that "all profits & benefits that are got by trade, working, fishing, or any other means" were to be placed in the common stock of the colony, and that, "all such persons as are of this colony, are to have their meat, drink, apparel, and all provisions out of the common stock." A person was to put into the common stock all he could, and take out only what he needed.

This "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" was an early form of socialism, and it is why the Pilgrims were starving. Bradford writes that "young men that are most able and fit for labor and service" complained about 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 strong refused to work and the total amount of food produced was never adequate.

To rectify this situation, in 1623 Bradford abolished socialism. He gave each household a parcel of land and told them they could keep what they produced, or trade it away as they saw fit. In other words, he replaced socialism with a free market, and that was the end of famines.

Many early groups of colonists set up socialist states, all with the same terrible results. At Jamestown, established in 1607, out of every shipload of settlers that arrived, less than half would survive their first twelve months in America. Most of the work was being done by only one-fifth of the men, the other four-fifths choosing to be parasites. In the winter of 1609-10, called "The Starving Time," the population fell from five-hundred to sixty.

Then the Jamestown colony was converted to a free market, and the results were every bit as dramatic as those at Plymouth. In 1614, Colony Secretary Ralph Hamor wrote that after the switch there was "plenty of food, which every man by his own industry may easily and doth procure." He said that when the socialist system had prevailed, "we reaped not so much corn from the labors of thirty men as three men have done for themselves now."

Before these free markets were established, the colonists had nothing for which to be thankful. They were in the same situation as Ethiopians are today, and for the same reasons. But after free markets were established, the resulting abundance was so dramatic that the annual Thanksgiving celebrations became common throughout the colonies, and in 1863, Thanksgiving became a national holiday.

Thus the real reason for Thanksgiving, deleted from the official story, is: Socialism does not work; the one and only source of abundance is free markets, and we thank God we live in a country where we can have them.

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#1. To: DeaconBenjamin (#0)

Socialism does not work; the one and only source of abundance is free markets, and we thank God we live in a country where we can have them.

If and when we can get rid of the parasitic Lending Class, America will actually be blessed with a free market again. Until then, it's a stylized form of feudalism.

bluegrass  posted on  2005-11-24   9:30:08 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply  


#2. To: bluegrass (#1)

I'm not familiar with the term Feneration.

DeaconBenjamin  posted on  2005-11-24   9:44:26 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply  


#3. To: DeaconBenjamin (#2)

It means lending money at interest.

bluegrass  posted on  2005-11-24   12:54:53 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply  


#4. To: bluegrass (#3)

Efforts on to harmonise Islamic finance with global system

LUXEMBOURG: Rapid growth in Islamic banking is giving some central bankers headaches, plunging them into the debate over how to fit sharia-compliant investments into the broader global financial system.

At the same time, those inside the Islamic banking community have yet to harmonise the operating rules under sharia, the laws that govern Islam.

Devout Muslims who invest along sharia guidelines will not purchase assets that pay interest, or derive profits from alcohol, pork and gambling.

The majority of today's Islamic-based investments, estimated to be anywhere from $200 to $400 billion in size globally, are built around the concept of profit-sharing rather than the charging of interest.

"Indirectly you are getting a return, but the difference is that this return is not guaranteed. That is our headache in the central bank. You pull in all these funds and then you say the return was so much. So transparency is needed," said Lebanese Central Bank Governor Riad Salameh.

Salameh, speaking on the sidelines of the Islamic Financial Services Forum, which ended on November 9, said the fact that financial decisions are open to religious interpretation makes it challenging to create a global standard.

"Islamic banking is relying on interpretation that can be different in every bank based on the religious source. So to go from that point to a standard approach will take some time and convincing," he said.

"They don't have an order or a hierarchy, even religiously, that they can go to and say these are the principles to adopt."

One leading sharia scholar however says the principles are all the same.

"We are in agreement on principles but the difference is in the details...there are different practices," said Sheikh Nizam Yaquobi, a sharia scholar at Bahrain's Global Securities House and a member of the Accounting and Auditing Organization for Islamic Financial Institutions (AOFIFI).

Yaquobi said recent research in Bahrain found 90 percent of the rulings of bank sharia boards internationally are consistent, citing the 10 percent as leaving room for innovation and debate.

But the basic ground rules have yet to be set, and that is creating problems for the industry too.

"It is a headache. The headache being that it operates on models that are not identical to existing models. We are not based on borrowing and lending on interest," Professor Rifaat Ahmed Abdel Karim, secretary general of the Kuala Lumpur-based Islamic Financial Services Board, told Reuters.

Challenges: For many forum participants, hearing that the market is growing at a steady 15 percent per year is small comfort when the market is still considered so opaque.

That kind of growth however and the untapped investment potential of roughly 15 million Muslims living in Europe alone is providing the industry a strong incentive to address its still numerous problems.

In addition to the lack of standardized sharia rulings, the investor base is still considered uninformed. Sector growth is also being hampered by a serious lack of information and sufficient disclosure, barriers to innovation, and the myriad of banking regulations that shift from country to country.

Innovation in the small market and adoption by a critical mass of investors requires banks to create new instruments, however recouping their costs will be difficult.

"As capital markets tend to be highly competitive and patents on financial innovations are a rarity, capital markets may suffer from a free-rider problem that creates insufficient innovation," said Hasnita Dato Hashim, head of product development and institutional business at Kuala Lumpur-based Guidance Financial Group.

Additionally, keeping this kind of proprietary information secret could pose a problem for sharia scholars who believe in spreading knowledge.

Hashim said her firm spent $10 million developing a U.S. mortgage backed security. The design is now freely available. Analysts studying the sector lament the lack of information and disclosure available to investors, hampering their work.

"There is no single international reporting standard, and what standards there are internationally are not being applied consistently in the Islamic banking universe," said Farouk Soussa, London-based sovereign credit analyst at Standard & Poor's.

DeaconBenjamin  posted on  2005-11-24   13:57:16 ET  Reply   Untrace   Trace   Private Reply  


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