Margaret Thatcher

The Iron Lady is 80 years old.

In my first year of graduate study, I was in a seminar given by James Buchanan and he began talking about Europe. He said that it was easy to underestimate the legacy of Margaret Thatcher, and provided a simply illustration: in the 1970s, whenever he was at a conference the British Professors would stand out on account of their poor clothing. By the 1990s they were as well dressed, presentable, and prosperous as their colleagues.

The point is that if you compare Great Britain in 1979, with the Great Britain of 1991, the transformation is remarkable. It's easy to overestimate how much of that is down to the Prime Minister, but Margaret Thatcher embodies all that is good and all that is bad, about government.

The Good

• She was principled. If one geniunely believes that democracy is an ends in itself (i.e. the left) then one must accept her right to do what she did
• She showed that vested interests can be beaten
• She was willing to be unpopular, in order to pass bills she believed in
• She shifted the balance of power away from producers, and toward consumers (which is truly democratic)
• She wasn't a feminist, and thereby became a superb role model for women
• Her role in the Cold War. Whilst clear, and willing to engage in the moral fight, she was a negotiator: "I like Mr. Gorbachev -- we can do business together." Although Gorby is the greatest hero, Thatcher's role was integral.
• She was completely, utterly correct to say: "They’re casting their problem on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people"

The Bad

• The gains from her policies were biased in favour of London, and the South-East
• Militant twats like Derek Hatton 
• National industries was privatized, making lots of money for the government and certain investors. Rather than turn a state monopoly into a private monopoly, they should have been made competitive
• Income tax fell, and VAT rose - i.e. manipulations of the tax code that can be expressed as being "a tax cut" but is actually not
• Macro management that sae interest rates reach 17% and inflation hit 18%

Notice how "the good" are largely comments on her personality, whereas "the bad" are inevitable consequences of central government.

In summary, she made the left unhappy, and the right happy. As a Conservative Prime Minister then, she was a "good" one. But for those of us who are liberal, national politics shouldn't be about groups that come to power and benefit themselves at the expense of others. Politics should be a positive sum game, that all citizens benefit from. The biggest problem with Thatcher, in my opinion, is that:

She has given a generation of non-economists the impression that support for free markets is equivalent to support for the vested interests of the rich. Nothing could be further from the truth.
S&M

Thatcher was a Tory using central power to get her own way. The left shouldn't be angry with her though. They should see the harm that she did, and conclude not that "the wrong person was in charge", but that the system that creates such power should be changed.

At the end of the day, a Tory PM and a Labour PM have more in common than people like to admit. And it's not the Toryness of Labourness that's the problem, it's the PM part...

Comments

[dearieme]

She was right on the Unions: she reduced their power and redistributed much of what was left from the Officers to the Members. She never found a solution to one of the huge problems evident when she won office. Her Labour opponents had promised a huge, inflationary pay-rise to government employees; to have a chance of winning the election, she obviously felt that she had to promise to match it. She honoured the promise and harm was done. Has anyone got a solution to problems of this sort?

[Andrew Mellor]

I think one bad point that you failed to include was the fact that Thatcher created a total feeling of worthlessness amongst the vast majority of the working class (except those few who were fortunate enough to be able to buy their council houses, who felt temporarily loved I suppose)and this worthlessnes led to political alienation. I think also two of your good points are actually bad points - she wasn't afraid to pursue unpopular policies (rather she, like Blair, didn't care for the priorities and feelings of the majority of ordinary Britons who elected her), and she was Principled (yes, so indeed was Adolf Hitler, but that's an old cliche).

[Cheap Jordan 1]

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