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What You Should Be Grateful For On Thanksgiving Day
This article originally appeared in The Daily Capitalist.
Every year celebrations of Thanksgiving give thanks for the blessings of God for our well-being. As a skeptic, curmudgeon, and capitalist, I attribute my blessings to free market capitalism. I believe America's success is the result of two ideas and ideals: human rights derived from Natural Law and it's corollary, the freedom to act in one's self-interest in human society, a.k.a., free market capitalism.
I feel grateful for the fact that I am an American, warts and all, that I am married to a wonderful woman and have a fine son both of whom I admire and love, that we are healthy, that I live in a beautiful place, Montecito, and that my (mostly) freedom loving country has given me the opportunity to achieve some level of success.
I know what's wrong with the world, but it is important to recognize what is right with the world. And today is a good time to do that.
I keep two files: one is "Things Are Getting Better" and "Things Are Getting Worse." I think throughout history, every society has its optimists and pessimists who look at the same world and see something different. One of my favorite quotations is from Marcus Tullius Cicero, statesman, orator and writer (106-43 BCE):
Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.
It is always easy to criticize things as we see them today, but we have to see where we came from before we do that.
In my Getting Better file, I have a 1999 article from the Cato Institute which describes the positive forces of the 20th Century which have made our lives better:
These "Wonderful Trends" didn't come from the government, they came from the wealth created by free(er) market capitalism. Yes, water treatment, sanitation, and roads were built by government, but without the wealth created as a result of capitalism, there would have been no money for the government to spend on these benefits.
In today's Philadelphia Inquirer, Austrian theory economist Steve Horowitz writes:
In the Dec. 8, 1962, Saturday Evening Post, there was an advertisement for a Magnavox "Stereo Theatre": a large console containing a television (black and white), a turntable, and a six-speaker system. This was pretty much the top-of-the-line system of its kind at the time. It listed for $498.50.
The average private-sector wage at the time was about $2.50 per hour. Ignoring taxes, it would have taken about 200 hours of work at that wage to afford the Magnavox system.
At the average October 2010 wage of $19.17 per hour, it would take only 26 hours - about an eighth of the time it took in the 1960s - to afford a piece of equipment that expensive. If the same equipment were available at the same price today, it would suggest that today's average American is effectively eight times richer than the average American of the early '60s. ...
A 20-inch stereo color TV at Sears cost $370 in 1985; today, you could get one for $110. For $370 today, you could get a 32-inch LCD TV or better. In 1985, the 20-inch color TV would have required 42 hours of work at the then-average wage of $8.82. Today, a worker could buy the equivalently priced but higher-quality TV after working just 5.3 hours. ...
This is a huge and often overlooked story of the last 200 years: Market competition has led to innovations and cost reductions that enable us to have more of what we need and want for less time at work, giving us more time to devote to hobbies, friends, and family. Markets enrich us not just by creating "stuff," but also by giving us more of the most precious human resource: time.
I am thankful.
Happy Thanksgiving.
*****
There are several good articles today on the benefits of capitalism appropriate to today to be found at Cato and The Mises Institute.
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I am greatful for Ben Bernacke, Hanky Panky Paulson, and lil' Turbo Timmy and our current free market capitalism system. Without the increases in fraud, corruption, Stimulus Acts, $700 billion bailouts, TARP, real inflation, insider trading, QEI, QEII, and $75,000 Camero's. Where would we be without all this Free Market Capitalism? God bless America. I'll buy two turkeys and a Ham on my SNAP Card next year as the NASDAQ breaks up over $5750 ! ! ! I'll call up my broker on my brand new Obama Fone and tell him to sell my AMZN AAPL CMG BIDU PCLN NFLX. so I can buy me a used $75,000 Camero for for ZeroDown 144 month @ 29.75% and a new house in the white folk part of town. Yes I am very thankful for Green Shoots, Hula Hoops, pat downs and strip seaches with sexy TSA babes !
We are measured by how much foreign made TV we can buy for our wages, well actually, borrowed wages via 23% credit card, since many can't pay cash.
Great. I feel better, and considerably richer now, with my country's economy in safe hands and on a sound footing.
I would go back to 1910 in a heartbeat and leave behind all of the "modern conveniences" for a life with more liberty. When common sense was valued instead of scoffed at. When a dollar was a real dollar. When a man's word meant something. When the majority of a man's wealth could be held by hand (meaning it was physical.) When people knew more about important things than entertainers. When people would consider others when conducting themselves..
You can have your TV's for 26 hours of work, or whatever..
"It's no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society" Krishnamurti
my thanks go to TSA for security at the airports - safety first!
watch this very funny, smartly done video...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwsVi9ULwLI
Speaking of TSA... Is this what things have come to? Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade with kids lining the streets and watching on TV, and here is Kanye West featured on a NY Daily News float "rapping and writhing" while repeatedly grabbing his crotch. Is this repeated in-your-kids-face crotch-grabbing what the NY Daily News and Macy's consider appropriate for kids watching the Thanksgiving parade?
As for Kanye West, he should have gone to the Wash D.C. parade where he could have been featured atop the TSA float with all the TSA crotch grabbers and child molesters.
I wonder if the federal government will establish November 4 as a new federal holiday in honor of Quantitative Easing. Sort of like Thanksgiving...thank you Chairman Bernanke, O Great Spirit in the Sky Helicopter, for the bounty you bestow on the U.S. Treasury and the stock market. Thank you Bountiful Ben for robbing the poor and middle class so that the filthy rich can feast on Other Peoples Money.
Overheard Thanksgiving prayer by Lloyd Blankfein at Goldman Sachs board meeting.
"Bless Ben Bernanke for giving us a lifeline when we were about to sink like rock in September 2008...for taking us about-to-be-poor, scared multimillionaires into the Federal Reserve family by approving our application to be a bank holding company, and for waiving the pesky waiting period to review our application and perform due diligence. Bless Ben for all the other multibillion dollar "accommodations" he has bestowed on Goldman Sachs in these years of peril to our ill-gotten bonuses."
"Thank Hank Paulson, our Godfather, for killing our competitors Bear Stearns and Lehman, for knee capping Merrill Lynch, for saving our behinds from billions of $ of counterparty risk at Fannie, Freddie, and AIG. Thank Hank, truly a family man, for allowing the Goldman Sachs family to control key positions at the U.S. Treasury and to advise him on how best to fleece the taxpayers. In these dire times, when even we Masters of the Universe may be exposed and toppled, let us thank Hank for giving us every chance to survive...to scam taxpayers, municipalities, pension funds, and widowers to support our gambling-with-other-peoples-money empire. We kiss your ring, Hank, for giving Goldman Sachs, the company, a $10 billion bonus (TARP) from hard-working taxpayers. Yes, though times are tough, we have a lot to be thankful for at Goldman Sachs."
A hard rain's gonna fall.
I am grateful that when I dropped my whiskey bottle it did not break,no sales on holidays... Cowboys lost, Longhorns playin A&M right now. Plenty of beer & booze, my family is warm & full..I am grateful.
I'm grateful for the hilarious, pithy, and perspicacious comments at zerohedge. I'm grateful for zerohedge.
I am grateful for Ben Bernanke saving the economies of the western world when almost all hope was lost... All that study of the Great Depression paid off after all...
A Connecticut Thanksgiving Proclamation http://www.jud.ct.gov/lawlib/history/thanksgiving.htm
No list can be complete without "Tons of pigiron produced per capita".