Of all holidays celebrated in the United States of America, Thanksgiving is my favorite.  It’s probably sacrilegious that I rank Christmas second to Thanksgiving, given that the former is the celebration of the birth of Christ and the latter is loosely based on some non-factual myth about Indians and Pilgrims eating turkey and corn together.  No matter, Thanksgiving is my favorite.

If Christmas was really a day in which we gathered as family to celebrate the birth of Christ and shared perhaps a present or two, I might like Christmas better.  But Christmas isn’t a single holiday, it’s an entire season; a complete commercialized extravaganza in which virtually any semblance of the celebration of the birth of Christ is utterly lost.  The retail outlets start pushing Christmas promotions even before Thanksgiving occurs.  To add insult to injury, most of them now prefer to the season as the “Holiday Season”, stripping any reference to Christ from their promotional material.  Only Wal-Mart (remember them, the employee-exploiting, customer-cheating, supplier-bashing, most evil corporation in the entire universe) has recently decided to again give Christ top billing during Christmas.

When our kids and their cousins were young we spent months buying them obscene amounts of presents to cram under the tree.  I’ve got photos of trees with at least a hundred presents beneath.  The relatives would come and on Christmas morning we would open the presents.  We had a tradition of opening just one present at a time, so the entire ordeal took probably an hour and a half.  The result was always predictable.  After the kids opened present after present, the finite scarcity of economic resources eventually imposed itself and the presents ran out.  Inevitably, within two hours of the commencement of this crass, commercial free-for-all, one or more of the kids would end up crying!  Yeah, man, that’s what Christmas is all about; it’s about teaching us that material things don’t buy happiness!  Year after year we conducted this perverted economic experiment, which always ended with disillusioned young people who had almost no idea about why Christmas was supposed to be celebrated.  As much as I tried to take a few minutes to read the Christmas story from the Bible, the message was always lost in the piles of discarded wrapping paper and ribbons.  That’s why I don’t like Christmas.

Thanksgiving is another story.  Compared to Christmas, Thanksgiving is simple and its message always gets through.  We get together for the weekend at the home of the oldest generation.  At first it was at Grandma’s house, the mantle was passed to our parents, and now it is our turn.  A really great dinner is prepared, complete with turkey, stuffing, green beans with onions on top, cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes, olives, pickles, mashed potatoes, gravy, and dinner rolls.  Pumpkin pie with real whipped cream is served for dessert.  Gifts are not exchanged.  While Deb works the hardest in the preparation of this mighty meal, I get to carve the turkey.  Then, when we are all seated at the dinner table, I say a prayer thanking God for his gifts of bounty and health on our family.   We ask for his forgiveness and pray for his continued guidance.  It is a short prayer, perhaps only a minute long, but we hold hands around the table, everyone sitting in silence as that prayer is said.  This is an important time for our family as it is the only occasion during the entire year when we are together to pray in his presence.  Even though we are not farmers, for me Thanksgiving is the celebration of the harvest.  It is a time to acknowledge God’s goodness to our family and to our great nation, America the beautiful!  We stop to remember the significant events of the past year and to reflect on our blessings.  I think that each of also silently recognizes that solely because of the grace of God we often receive undeserved blessings.  He has been truly good to us.

I want to wish you and your family a wonderful Thanksgiving.  Have some fun, watch some football, go for a walk around the neighborhood if you can stand up after eating that huge meal!  Take a minute to tell your wife how much you love her.  Tell your husband how much you appreciated it when he tightened the hinges on the cabinet door last week.  Hug your kids, even if they are over 30 years old!  If you’ve got grandchildren, the blessings are obvious.  Remember that grandparents are extremely important in the lives of young ones.  I’ve only seen my son cry once in his life and that was at the funeral of his grandpa.

This is a crazy world we live in, full of problems and sadness but forget about all of that on November 23, 2006.  Chill.  Relax.  Celebrate the best holiday of them all…Thanksgiving!

On Thursday, November 16, 2006 Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman succumbed to heart complications in San Francisco.  He was 94 years old.  As a practicing economist I can think of no other individual who has influenced my thinking or shaped the emphasis of my teaching more than Milton Friedman.  As Milton has gotten on in years I have occasionally pondered how tragic it will be for the world when he leaves us.   Unfortunately all men must eventually pass from this earth.

When Friedman was a young scholar economic theory was dominated by the influence of John Maynard Keynes, who advocated government spending as a way out of the great depression.  Keynesian theory argued that free-market capitalism could not ensure full employment and the federal government should instead “fine tune” the economy by manipulating government spending (fiscal policy).  The Keynesians, as they were known, dominated economic thinking from 1935 through the 1970’s.  When I was a young graduate student in the mid 1970’s all of my professors were Keynesians.  I was fed a steady diet from the Keynesian buffet table stocked by economists who believed that big government was the answer to most of the world’s problems.  Like most graduate students, I generally accepted the intellectual food that I was fed.

Meanwhile, Friedman was quietly working on his “quantity theory of money” in which he described how the Federal Reserve System (part of Big Government) had actually caused the great depression by choking off the money supply between 1929 and 1932.   According to Friedman, the depression was caused not by a failure of capitalism, but by the failure of government (the Fed).  Friedman later won a Nobel Prize for his research on the effect of the money supply on the economy.

While he was no doubt one of the most brilliant economists of the 20th century, Friedman achieved the distinction of being perhaps the most communicative and popularly known economist of all time.  His book, Free to Choose (1980), which he co-authored with his wife Rose, is still available in bookstores.  A popular 10-part series with the same name was later aired on PBS in January of 1980.  In that series, Friedman advocated laissez faire economic policies that are just now being appreciated by policy makers, including voucher systems for education and decriminalization of drugs.

I never met Milton Friedman.  He came to my university to deliver a lecture in 1974, a year prior to my arrival.  However, his intellectual influence on me and on the broader society has been enormous.  Freedman was a likeable and humble man.  He reminded us that interventionist government policies carry with them a huge cost in economic efficiency and personal freedoms.  To honor him is to constantly reinforce the lessons he taught us.  Failure to do so will seriously jeopardize our future as a prosperous and free people.

At the time this column is being written the Democrats have won control of the US House of Representatives and will probably control the Senate as well.  One fact is clear, the public is not happy with Republicans.  In my opinion the Republicans got just what they deserved in the 2006 mid-term elections.  While Democrats are gleeful today, perhaps this midterm “shock” was just what the Republicans needed to re-acquaint themselves with the real world.

I remember 1994 when Republicans supported a legislative platform called the “Contract with America,” which promised to get federal spending under control, reduce the tax burden and shrink the size of the federal government.   That “Contract” was widely embraced by the American people earning Republicans control of the House of Representatives.   In the 1995 federal budget drafted by the Republicans stated:

“America stands at a crossroads.  Down one path lies more and more debt and the continued degradation of the Federal Government and the people it is intended to serve.  Down the other lies the restoration of the American dream…we choose the second of these roads.  We do it because it’s right.  We do it because it’s sensible.  We do it because America’s future does not belong to the Congress, or the administration, or any political party.  It belongs to the people themselves.”

Those were inspiring words.  US voters readily accepted those sentiments and handsomely rewarded the Republican Party at the polls.  Unfortunately over the past 12 years the Republicans have squandered their inheritance.  Federal spending has grown 49% since 1995, even after adjusting for inflation.  The public debt was $4.9 trillion in 1995 and now stands at $8.2 trillion.  The Republicans promised term limits for federal offices but didn’t deliver.  They aligned themselves too rigidly with America’s Christian Right, attempting to pass a marriage amendment to the federal constitution, opposing abortion rights, advocating “intelligent design” in school curriculums, and standing in the way of embryonic stem cell research.  They became power-hungry and arrogant, forgetting the contract that they had made with the American people.

The Republicans narrowly elected George Bush to a second term in 2004.  Contrary to what Democrats say, Bush isn’t a stupid man but he is a poor public speaker and an ineffective communicator.  His defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, totally botched the War in Iraq by not putting enough boots on the ground early.  Iraqi’s looted the country and radical insurgents were not subjected to discipline in the streets.  Early, strict and brutal action by American forces was the only way to negate the long-standing culture of violence in Iraq, but neither political party had the stomach to “play the game” by the rules of the insurgents.  The Iraq dilemma was inevitable; when “politically correct” faces a “throat-slitting terrorist”, the terrorist will win every time.

There have been some bright spots in Iraq (free elections, and the re-establishment of freedom of religion), but the arrogance and inaction of Rumsfeld finally ran its course.  On Saturday, November 4, 2006 the Army Times Web site called for the resignation of Rumsfeld saying that he has “lost credibility with the uniformed leadership, with the troops, with Congress and with the public at large.”  The same editorial appeared in the Air Force Times, the Navy Times, and the Marine Corps Times.  According to the editorial American training forces have told their superiors that Iraqi troops “have no sense of national identity, are only in it for the money, don’t show up for duty, and cannot sustain themselves.”  Colonels and Generals have asked for more troops and Rumsfeld has ignored their requests.  It is a relief to all concerned that Rumsfeld was forced to resign the day after the election.  Good riddance to him.

While some will blame the Republican defeat primarily on the War in Iraq, it is my contention that Tuesday’s election results were simply the final bump in a fourteen-year downward trend of Republican political influence.  That decline was caused by Republican arrogance and broken promises.  Going into this election the Democrats never had a “plan” for Iraq, for the economy, or anything else.  They didn’t need any plan.  All they had to do was be anti-Republican and anti-Bush to win the election.  Now the Democrats can no longer get away with complaining; they have a job to do.  I sincerely wish them good luck.

Having lost credibility as the party of limited government and stumbling under the leadership of a President who couldn’t or wouldn’t make the right moves in Iraq, Republicans got their “just desserts” on Tuesday.  Although I almost threw up on the floor while doing it, I voted for most of those Republicans.  Today I don’t feel sorry for them in the least.