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IPFS News Link • American History

Thanksgiving and the Birth of American Free Enterprise

• https://www.fff.org by Richard M. Ebeling

The turkey is carved, the stuffing and sweet potatoes are passed around, and many slices of pumpkin pie are happily consumed. But how many of us know or appreciate that Thanksgiving really celebrates the failure of socialism and the birth of free enterprise in America?

With all the calls for a "democratic" socialism to be established in the United States, it is worth remembering the first attempt to put in place a form of economic collectivism in that early period of American history, and the disastrous consequences it brought for the Pilgrim Fathers after they settled in Plymouth, Massachusetts.

The English Puritans, who left Great Britain and sailed across the Atlantic on the Mayflower in 1620, were not only escaping from religious persecution in their homeland.