Thanksgiving and the Public Good

(This article was originally published November 26, 2014 in the Spirit - and I am thankful that things have changed in West Virginia for the better over the last 5 years. I am thankful for that. Happy Thanksgiving to all! - Elliot)

Thanksgiving is upon us. Today my wife and I went out to pick up our locally raised turkey. Giving thanks for our blessings is a great reason to celebrate a holiday. My wife and I are fortunate in that we will be sharing that experience with friends and family. We hope that you will too and wish you and yours a Happy Thanksgiving.

The first Thanksgiving is generally believed to have been celebrated in 1621, making it the oldest American holiday. Only a year earlier the Pilgrims had landed at Plymouth Rock. Thanksgiving did not become a national holiday until 1863, however, in December of 1777, there was a day of Thanksgiving observed by all of the colonies commemorating the surrender of British General Burgoyne at Saratoga. Also, on October 3, 1789, a Proclamation was issued by George Washington setting aside November 26th of that year as “A Day of Publick Thanksgiving and Prayer.” Entitled “General Thanksgiving,” Washington’s Proclamation stated that Congress requested that he recommend to the American people a day “to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and signal favors of Almighty God.”

The Proclamation emerged from what was the first session of Congress, where the first version of the Bill of Rights was introduced, September 25,, 1789. When finally ratified in 1791, it codified the immortal words of the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights - that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”

Contrast this to the comments of Dan Ratner at the recent conference in Chicago of the National Association of Business Economists, where he said, “There is no such thing as truth. There is only the most recent updated version of it.” Writing on the Mises Institute website, economist Christopher Westley says that Ratner was “one of President Obama’s tech gurus for the 2012 election cycle and expert in the hip field of Big Data mining”. According to Ratner’s website, after the election was over he co-founded Public Good Software, a company that aims to “re-imagine online philanthropy” - In other words, fundraising. Apparently, the company uses data mining to develop algorithms that identify news stories that can be effective in motivating people to act.

One could argue that Thomas Paine’s pamphlet, Common Sense, published in 1776 did the same thing. It is often cited as a prime motivator in getting the colonists to rebel against the British. However, what used to be “self-evident” truths are now “updated versions of it”. Take for example the term “the general welfare” referred to in the Constitution. Over the years, its meaning has been stretched far beyond its original intent, instead becoming a justification for all sorts of government intervention and a rationale for the dismantling of the Bill of Rights. To some extent, “general welfare” has mutated into what is now called “public good” – like Mr. Ratner’s software company.

The definition of “public good” is nuanced differently by different sources, but the consensus is that “it is a product that one individual can consume without reducing its availability to another individual and from which no one is excluded”. That would mean that a “public good” is one where there is an unlimited supply – or at least enough supply to satisfy the needs of every consumer. In other words, it is a conundrum.

The truth is, there are very few “public goods” that cannot be better provided for by the private sector. Attempts to force “public good” status on things that aren’t can have dire unintended consequences. When the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, food and the land used for farming were considered public goods and they originally embarked on a system of communal farming. Output was stored centrally to be distributed “as needed”. Within a couple short years there was a shortage of food. Wrote Governor William Bradford, “the settlers now began to consider corn more precious than silver”.

Bradford recognized that the collectivist culture of the colony was the root cause of the problem. According to Wikipedia, “The Pilgrims held an actual thanksgiving celebration in 1623, after a switch from communal farming to privatized farming, a fast, and a refreshing 14-day rain resulted in a larger harvest.” Wrote Governor Bradford, “instead of famine now God gave them plenty, and the face of things was changed, to the rejoicing of the hearts of many, for which they blessed God.” In 1624, the harvest was so plentiful that the colonists began exporting corn. The Pilgrims abandoned socialism and the rest, as they say, is history.

Speaking of socialism, last August TheStreet.com published an intriguing list that ranked the least and most socialist states in America. Wrote Kurumi Fukushima, “In order to measure the degree to which different states reflect socialist principles, we determined state expenditures and state GDP (Gross Domestic Product) as the best indicators because socialist states tax and spend a higher percentage of their GDP”. Ranked least socialist was Texas with an “expenditures as a proportion of GDP” of 6.99%. Ranked most socialist was West Virginia coming in at a whopping 34.1%. In other words, state spending in West Virginia is proportionally nearly five times greater than Texas, and of course, Texas ranks at or near the top of most economic categories, while West Virginia ranks at or near the bottom.

If the last election is any indication, something revolutionary is taking place in West Virginia – Common Sense might be taking hold. Perhaps in a few short years what happened at Plymouth could happen here. As Victor Hugo said, “Nothing is stronger than an idea whose time has come”. He also said, “A day will come when there are no battlefields, but markets opening to commerce and minds opening to ideas”. That would be something to be truly thankful for.