Thanksgiving draws people, regardless of race or creed, together around a table heavy with food and laughter. At its center sits a golden turkey, but it’s the sides (mashed potatoes, green beans, stuffing, and gravy) that spark the most excitement. American football murmurs from the television as plates and hands cross the table, passing dishes with the casual choreography of family life.
This is, in spirit, the very scene Frédéric Bastiat once imagined when he marveled at how Paris was fed each morning. “It staggers the imagination,” he wrote, “to comprehend the vast multiplicity of objects that must pass through its gates tomorrow… And yet all are sleeping peacefully at this moment.” No single mind coordinates the miracle and yet, it happens.
Thanksgiving is the modern version of Bastiat’s wonder. What we see is the feast itself: Mom and Nana pulling the turkey from the oven. The Department of Agriculture reports that roughly 46 million turkeys, about the population of Spain, are eaten every Thanksgiving. The extended family that arrives hours before the meal is ready is joined by 1.6 million people who travel on Thanksgiving. Dad and his child switch between American football and the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, joining the more than 100 million viewers who tune in each year, coordinated across satellites, networks, advertisers, and camera crews, so that the same spectacle can play out in millions of living rooms at once.
What remains unseen are the invisible threads of cooperation that make the Thanksgiving table possible. Long before the turkey reached the oven, farmers in Iowa, Nebraska, and Arkansas were raising it, relying on feed grown by other farmers and transported by rail from thousands of miles away. The green beans and sweet potatoes come from networks of growers, processors, and distributors whose work depends on forecasts, algorithms, and trade routes most of us never think about. Truck drivers cross state lines to deliver ingredients to logistics managers who ensure that shelves stay stocked. Every piece comes together until someone realizes the cranberry sauce is missing. Last-minute panic sets in, and a quick dash to the grocery store follows.
Today such a trip isn’t seen with wild wonder. But in 1989, during a policy shift called perestroika, or restructuring, the USSR sent a delegation to thaw relations with the United States. Alongside a tour of NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Texas, the foreign delegation made an unscheduled stop at a Randalls Supermarket. Among them was future Russian President Boris Yeltsin, who, astonished by the variety of foods, claimed, “Even the Politburo doesn’t have this choice. Not even Mr. Gorbachev.” The visit left Yeltsin at a loss for words: “I think we have committed a crime against our people by making their standard of living so incomparably lower than that of the Americans.”
Since its founding in 1917, the Soviet Union endured famine with grim regularity. The Volga famine of 1917–1922 claimed between five and seven million lives. A decade later, the Holodomor of 1932–1933 starved another five to eight million, and after World War II, the famine of 1946–1947 took roughly two million more. Each disaster was born not of nature but of policy: central planning, forced collectivization, and the state’s determination to control production.
By the 1990s, the pattern of scarcity persisted, mocking the propaganda that declared, “Life has become easier, comrades; life has become happier.” In April 1991, bread prices rose 300 percent, beef 400 percent, and milk 350 percent. Shortages grew so severe that Premier Mikhail Gorbachev appealed to the international community for humanitarian aid, with officials admitting that the USSR had “flung itself around the world, looking for aid and loans.”
Shipments of frozen chicken, nicknamed “Bush legs” after President George H. W. Bush, were flown in to feed the population. The image carried an irony history could not have scripted better: just decades earlier, at the height of the Cold War in the 1950s, Premier Nikita Khrushchev had thundered before Western diplomats, “About the capitalist states, it doesn’t depend on you whether or not we exist. If you don’t like us, don’t accept our invitations, and don’t invite us to come see you. Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you.” Yet by the end of the century, the USSR that vowed to bury the West was surviving on American poultry—in other words, on capitalist chicken. The spiraling crisis soon escalated into nationwide strikes and protests demanding the end of the system itself. By Christmas Day, December 25, 1991, the Soviet Union dissolved, undone by the same command economy that had once promised to abolish hunger.
Even the most ardent bureaucrats, armed with vast tracts of farmland and central plans, could not guide the Soviet Union into prosperity, let alone feed its people. Yet the urge to direct, ration, and manage markets never disappears; it only changes its accent.
Today, in New York City, the beating heart of global finance, the temptation to fix the market endures. Mayor-elect Mahmood Mamdani has proposed government-run grocery stores as “a public option for produce,” arguing that too many New Yorkers find groceries out of reach. His plan would cost roughly $60 million, financed through higher corporate taxes at 11.5 percent and a new 2 percent levy on those earning over a million dollars a year. Despite the recent failure of a government-run grocery store in Kansas City, which left local taxpayers with a $750,000 bill, New York’s food culture already rests on some 13,000 independent bodegas: small, adaptive enterprises that thrive precisely because they respond to local needs. A state-run grocery network would not only crowd them out, but also make the city more vulnerable to the very shortages it hopes to prevent.
Thanksgiving is a yearly proof of concept for liberty: a society of free individuals coordinating better than any plan could dictate. From Moscow to New York, the lesson remains the same. The miracle of prosperity does not flow from ministries or mayors, but from the voluntary cooperation of ordinary people who produce, trade, and trust one another.
The Soviet Union collapsed because it tried to command what can only be discovered, the daily knowledge of millions working freely. New York, for all its wealth, risks forgetting that lesson each time it trades competition for control. The feast that fills our tables each November is more than a meal; it is civilization itself, renewed by freedom and gratitude. Each Thanksgiving feast reminds us that civilization’s greatest miracles are not decreed; they are cooked, carried, traded, and shared by free people every day.
