Myths About Thanksgiving

The first Thanksgiving didn’t usher in a time of plenty for the Pilgrims. The Pilgrims continued to confront the specter of starvation until they ditched their collective farming practices in favor of individual property rights, which finally brought them prosperity by increasing incentives to produce and manage farms wisely. Property rights were also a feature of many Native American cultures, contrary to later claims that Native Americans had no concept of property rights (claims first invented by those who dispossessed them, and later repeated by radical environmentalists who sought to depict property rights as an institution peculiar to white settlers). I debunk some of these myths at this link.