As we celebrate our national day of Thanksgiving and enjoy family, friends, food and football, most of us pause to give thanks for our manifold blessings.
Our gratitude may be for our loved ones, for good health, for prosperity, for the great blessings of liberty (though sadly somewhat diminished) that we Americans have enjoyed.
Many of us will take time to give thanks to God, the creator "from Whom all blessings flow."
Let's take a closer look at one of those blessings — our prosperity, something so easy to take for granted. Yet our widespread affluence is a very recent development in human history.
Each semester, I share a portrait of life in America in 1907: average life expectancy, 47 years; percentage of homes with a bathtub, 14; percentage of homes with telephone service, 8; total number of miles of paved roads, 144; average wage, 22 cents per hour.
My own father grew up in a family of eight in a two-room hovel with no indoor plumbing or electricity in eastern Montana in the 1920s and '30s.
Today, the average American enjoys amenities and conveniences undreamt of by the monarchs of Europe in 1900. Many marvelous technologies — air travel, the ability to drive 75 mph on smooth roads in a climate-controlled vehicle listening to one's choice of the world's music or a broadcast of an athletic contest, instant communication through a variety of devices — have not only been developed, but also are widely affordable.
Perhaps, on Thanksgiving, we should pause to reflect on where all these amazing things come from. Wealth doesn't just appear spontaneously; someone has to produce it.
Economics teaches us what the factors of production are: land (i.e., natural resources), labor and capital. But the most important factor of all is the human vision and intelligence that arrange these factors so as to produce things we value at a price low enough for masses of people to buy them.
This intelligence, this key to the wealth creation process, is the entrepreneur — the unsung hero of the amazing, unprecedented affluence that surrounds us. Sadly, we tend to take affluence for granted. Often, instead of receiving gratitude or praise for improving our lives, the entrepreneur is subjected to disrespect, derision and condemnation.
Self-righteous political demagogues, who don't know the first thing about wealth creation and specialize in redistributing wealth created by others, insult entrepreneurs by declaring, "You didn't build (that business, that wealth-creating enterprise)."
The profits that entrepreneurs earn are vilified, falsely slandered as "unearned wealth" (a vestige of ignorant Marxian dogma) and signs of the moral depravity of greed (as if wanting to keep your own property is somehow greedier than other people clamoring for government to give them more of other people's wealth).
What do the huge profits of successful entrepreneurs really represent?
Unlike the fortunes that the political elite accumulate in economically rigged systems like feudalism, mercantilism and socialism, in a free-market economy characterized by voluntary, and therefore positive-sum, transactions, the profits of entrepreneurs signify that at least that much wealth has been created for their customers.
In other words, the larger profits are, the more wealth the entrepreneur has created for others, and indeed, the largest profits accrue to those firms that have supplied valuable goods and services to the masses.
How perverse that this precious talent for raising the standards of living of others induces those envious, resentful souls on the left to paint a bull's-eye on the back of those wealth creators and make them targets for government to confiscate more of the profits they justly earn in service to others.
Here is a historical fact that too few Americans recognize: The profit-seeking entrepreneur — not any government, church, charity or other worthy entity — deserves the credit for lifting us out of poverty and creating our material abundance.
Every day of the year, but especially on Thanksgiving, we should be grateful for entrepreneurs. They are our economic benefactors, the wealth creators who have enriched our lives.
• Hendrickson teaches economics at Grove City College in Pennsylvania.
