Thanksgiving 2023

From the 200+ authors at MasterResource to you, our readers.

Thanksgiving is a free market holiday. ““The true meaning of Thanksgiving is the triumph of Capitalism over the failure of Collectivism in all its forms,” Richard Ebeling has written. His classic essay “Thanksgiving: A Free Market Celebration,” begins:

This time of the year is when Americans gather with their families and friends and enjoy a Thanksgiving meal together. More than 54 million Americans are travelling this Thanksgiving to find their table of celebration in remembrance of those early Pilgrim Fathers who crossed the uncharted ocean from Europe to make a new start in Plymouth, Massachusetts.

What is less appreciated is that Thanksgiving also is a celebration of the birth of free enterprise in America. 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.

Some Climategate Recollections (14th Anniversary)

Editor Note: It was during Thanksgiving weekend 2009 that the unsettling oeuvre that became known as Climategate was disseminated. This post summarizes some remembrances from that period.

“There is no doubt that these emails are embarrassing and a public-relations disaster for science.” (Andrew Dessler, “Climate E-Mails Cloud the Debate,” December 10, 2009)

“They were shown: contriving to destroy inconvenient data in order to evade FOI inquiries; attempting to shut down scientific journals which published studies unhelpful to their cause; viciously bullying dissenters; even trying to rewrite history, for example, to erase the widely recognised Medieval Warming Period.” (James Delingpole, “My Finest Hour,” November 9, 2019)

Climategate lives in infamy. It remains a historic case study of agendas driving “science” rather than science informing agendas. Fourteen years ago, climate alarmists and friends of the involved scientists (including Dessler above) went into damage control.…

“Global Warming: A Dialogue” (Adler’s Judicial Activism Considered)

“Speculative incremental harm from a multi-decade global phenomenon has a classical liberal option: civil society charity. Uber-wealthy climate-related foundations can evaluate the harms to poor island villagers from sea level rise (as an example). But keep politicized science, global judicial activism, and backdoor Big Brother out of it.”

By 2004, after Jonathan Adler reversed positions to endorse climate policy activism, the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC) published a dialogue where Professor Adler defended his tort approach to address anthropogenic climate change with several classical liberals. Excerpts from “Global Warming: A Dialogue” follow.

This discussion is an edited version of comments made in December 2004 on the Free Market Environmentalism (FME) Roundtable list-serve. Jonathan Adler prodded his colleagues to forget, for just a minute, the debate over the impacts of warmer temperatures or whether humans are contributing or not.…

Adler on Bradley: A Response

Climate Policy vs. Classical Liberalism: The Curious Case of Jonathan Adler

“Greenhouse Policy without Regrets”: When Adler Refuted Climate Activism

The Futile Climate Crusade in One Graph

“Climate Emergency!” says Andrew Dessler (old vinegar in a new bottle)

“The Earth Is Warming, but Is CO2 the Cause?” (‘Ouch’ for climate alarmism)

Offshore U.S. Wind: Childish Energy Policy