Home | About | Columnists | Blog | Subscribe | Donate
The Government Demands That You Be Thankful
by William L. Anderson
by William L. Anderson
DIGG THIS
Today in the United States, we celebrate a holiday known as
"Thanksgiving." Many of us (including my family and I) will attend church
services this morning and many more will eat a very large meal with the main
dish usually being roasted turkey. At the table, most likely we will continue
what began at church - speaking about those things for which we are "thankful."
At one level, I have no problem with people being thankful for
their blessings. As a Christian, I thank God each day for my family, home, and
other things that I believe come from the bounty of God, and I am not ashamed
to say it. Yet, if we truly are thankful for our blessings on a daily basis,
then why do we have a special holiday in which we repeat those things that we
already have repeated?
In a word, the reason for Thanksgiving Day is government. It is on
this day that the government - specifically the President of the United States
- orders us to be thankful. Since our government is secular in form and
content, we really are supposed to be thankful to government for our bounty.
For example, I almost certainly will hear someone at church say
that he or she is "thankful that we live in a country where we can freely
worship God." Yet, people around the world have that freedom. One can put it
another way, a way that is guaranteed to offend others: "I am thankful that the
American state has not yet destroyed all of our freedoms, including the freedom
to worship God."
While I write this, the U.S. Government actively is debasing the
dollar, waging war against people who were not at war with us, arresting people
and falsely charging them with crimes, blocking mutually beneficial economic
exchanges, making it more difficult to produce and sell goods (and then
condemning producers for not producing enough), and then propagandizing us in
saying that the government is the only thing that gives our lives meaning.
While we think of the Pilgrims celebrating a successful harvest in
1621, Thanksgiving as an official government-sponsored holiday came to this
country via the presidency of Abraham Lincoln in 1863. While armies under his
command were destroying the harvests of the southern states, burning houses and
forcing families to face the winter without food and shelter, and generally
plundering and pillaging, he declared an official day of "Thanksgiving."
The next president to further make Thanksgiving a
government-sponsored holiday was Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1939. Thus, two of
the presidents who were most active in destroying the liberties and social
fabric of this country were at the forefront of telling everyone else how
thankful they should be.
Lest I appear to be an ingrate, again I say that I am thankful to
God for the blessings that I have received, however undeserved those blessings
may be. And I add that I am thankful to God that He has restrained the American
state, if for a season, to where it has not done as much harm as it could have
done. For now, we worship in relative peace; in the future, perhaps all of the
Thanksgiving services will be held in government buildings in which we thank
the state for the meager rations placed before us. We are not there, at least
yet, and I will be eternally thankful if that day is put off forever.
November 23, 2006
William L. Anderson, Ph.D. [send him mail], teaches economics at
Frostburg State University in Maryland, and is an adjunct scholar of the Ludwig
von Mises Institute.
Copyright © 2006 LewRockwell.com
William Anderson Archives
Back to LewRockwell.com Home Page
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
