"It's astonishing and a little horrifying that America's elites know so little about their country's history.
Case in point: Jared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute. Jared is an influential left-ish economic polemicist and a sometime adviser to Barack Obama on economic affairs.
I've debated with Jared dozens of times over the past several years, but what happened this week was especially disturbing.
On Monday night, I told Larry Kudlow about the story of the first Thanksgiving.
I explained that the first Thanksgiving was a celebration of abundance after a period of socialism and starvation.
It seems Bernstein never heard about this chapter in U.S. history; he called it an "exercise in revisionist history." Admitting that he had never read the memoirs of Plymouth governor William Bradford, he nevertheless dismissed the story as untrue.
But the facts are undeniable, and there is nothing to revise.
Bradford's historical accounts, which I quote below, have been read by schoolchildren for over 300 years.(Read on!)
...It's genuinely scary to me that a leading member of the left intellectual establishment--a group that will shortly rule both of our elected branches--doesn't know about America's first experiment with socialism.
On top of that, he doesn't care to know.
Neither did the philosopher kings who, ignorantly and blithely, imposed on our forebears a system that led to malnutrition, pestilence and mass fatalities.
But it has always been that way.
Men in ivory towers, ivied halls, foundation-funded think tanks or bustling newsrooms dream up new forms of social organization.
They write books, policy papers and five-year plans telling us all that is wrong with the way we live now and what could be done if we simply adhere to their analyses.
...When we remind them that their ideas have been tried--and found wanting--in the past, they cavalierly deny history, clap their hands over their ears and cry even more loudly for "change."
If we listen to them, we deserve what we will get.
Read all!
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