Writing for the Ayn Rand Institute, Gary Hull has published an ode to Thanksgiving as “the Producer’s Holiday”:
Thanksgiving celebrates man’s ability to produce. The cornucopia filled with exotic flowers and delicious fruits, the savory turkey with aromatic trimmings, the mouth-watering pies, the colorful decorations–it’s all a testament to the creation of wealth.
Thanksgiving is a uniquely American holiday, because this country was the first to create and to value material abundance. It is America that has been the beacon for anyone wanting to escape from poverty and misery. It is America that generated the unprecedented flood of goods that washed away centuries of privation. It is America, by establishing the precondition of production–political freedom–that was able to unleash the dynamic, productive energy of its citizens.
This should be a source of pride to every self-supporting individual. It is what Thanksgiving is designed to commemorate. But there are those, motivated by hatred for human comfort and happiness, who want to make Thanksgiving into a day of national guilt. We should be ashamed, they say, for consuming a disproportionate share of the world’s food supply. Our affluence, they say, constitutes a depletion of the “planet’s resources.” The building of dams, the use of fossil fuels, the driving of sports utility vehicles–they insist–are cause, not for celebration, but for atonement. What if, they all wail, the rest of the world consumed the way Americans do?
See the full op-ed for additional analysis.