The End of An Era

Margaret Thatcher’s death has particular poignancy for America today. She not only understood the socialist mentality, she articulated it in terms accessible to everyone.

Would that members of the Republican Party had her acuity and clarity.

So much of what she said about the failed socialist policies in Great Britain apply to America today. The only difference is that we have not travelled as far down that dead end road … yet.

The Left bludgeoned Thatcher with the so called “income gap” much the way they  use it against conservatives today. Thatcher translated what they are really saying:

So long as the gap is smaller, they would rather the poor were poorer provided the rich were less rich.” She followed that by warning “You do not create wealth and opportunity that way. You do not create a property-owning democracy that way.

In 1975 She told a US audience:

 The pursuit of equality is a mirage…What is more desirable and more practical than the pursuit of equality is the pursuit of equality of opportunity. And opportunity means nothing unless it includes the right to be unequal and the freedom to be different… 

In a 1977 speech, Thatcher said:

Choice in a free society implies responsibility on the part of the individual. There is no hard and fast line between economic and other forms of personal responsibility to self, family, firm, community, nation, God. Morality lies in choosing between feasible alternatives. A moral being is one who exercises his own judgment in choice, on matters great and small, bearing in mind their moral dimension, i.e. right and wrong. Insofar as his right to choose is taken away by the state, the party or the union, his moral facilities i.e. his capacity for choice, atrophy, and he becomes a moral cripple in the same way as we should lose the facility of walking, reading, seeing, if we were prevented from using them over the year.

According to the latest. U.S. figures:

• Entitlements accounted for 62 percent of all federal spending in fiscal year 2012.
• The number of Americans on food stamps grew from about 17 million in 2000 to more than 47 million today, nearly tripling in just 12 years.
• The number of Americans in the labor force — those who have a job or are looking for one — fell by nearly half a million people from February to March of 2013.
• The percentage of working-age adults in the labor force — what’s called the participation rate — fell to 63.3 percent last month, the lowest such figure since May 1979.

The atrophy is increasing, but not yet fatal.

Some entitlement spending may be explained by the recession. The rest is due to the administration’s policy of easing qualification requirements. Thatcher would doubtless say that the economic stagnation called the recession is also explained by this administration’s policies. And she would be correct.

On international policy Thatcher said of England:

We had come to be seen by both friends and enemies as a nation which lacked the will and capability to defend its interests in peace, let alone in war…

Think Benghazi, N. Korea and Iran.

Claire Berlinski in her excellent book, (reviewed here) Why Margaret Thatcher Matters, wrote:

She matters now because her battles are not over. Socialism was buried prematurely. Its appeal as a political program remains seductive and enduring.” It is “an ideology that is destined to rise again and again from the grave.

’Utopia never comes,’ Thatcher said. ‘We should not like it if it did.’”

R.I.P.