… is from page 19 of Melanie Kirkpatrick’s 2016 book, Thanksgiving: The Holiday at the Heart of the American Experience (footnote excluded):
For the late author Ayn Rand … the essential meaning of Thanksgiving was “a celebration of successful production.” The lavish meal, she wrote, is “a symbol of the fact that abundant consumption is the result and reward of production. Abundance is (or was and ought to be) America’s pride – just as it is the pride of American parents that their children never know starvation.”
DBx: The Pilgrims at Plymouth gave thanks not for the opportunity to work. Such opportunity is superabundant and will always be so, at least for as long as earth remains this side of paradise. Thanks were given for the fruits of work.
Work for its own sake is wasteful. Ditto for work that results in outputs that are worth less than are outputs that could have been, but were not, produced had that same work effort been applied differently.
As necessary and as noble as is production – as admirable as are those individuals who have a strong work ethic – as indisputably true is the observation that consumption is impossible without production – the only purpose of production is consumption. Consumption is what justifies production. Consumption, and only consumption, is the purpose of economic activity.
To all my fellow Americans: Happy Thanksgiving!!
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(Kirkpatrick above quotes Rand from the latter’s August 12, 1974, essay, “Cashing In on Hunger.”)