Thursday, November 22, 2012

Happy Thanksgiving!

On a personal level, I have much to be thankful for: everybody in the family is healthy, my kids are doing great, things are going fine at work, and I just celebrated my twentieth anniversary with my beautiful wife.

And although I'm worried about the direction of the country, I'm comforted by the fact that we live in a free, democratic, and capitalist society with built-in safeguards to keep us moving forward.  In the words of Sir John James Cowperthwaite, former Financial Secretary of Hong Kong:
"...in the long run the aggregate decisions of individual businessmen, exercising individual judgement in a free economy, even if often mistaken, is less likely to do harm than the centralized decisions of a government; and certainly the harm is likely to be counteracted faster."
(Lifted from P.J. O'Rourke's "Eat the Rich.").  Appropriately, this lesson of individual initiative over collectivism was the history of the Plymouth Plantation and our first Thanksgiving.

So let's give thanks for a hundred TV channels, American football, and the magic of supply chain management which brings frozen turkeys and gelatinous cranberry sauce to our homes.

Have a good day, everyone.

1 comment:

Tregonsee said...

"...built-in safeguards to keep us moving forward." I used to take comfort in that. However, the press, arguably the most important, has failed abjectly to investigate or even publicize some of the extra-legal and -constitutional hijinks of this administration. See almost any period of history for details on this path.