John OSullivan, Executive Editor, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, gave a speech May 9, 2008 at Hillsdale College.
The following is based on that speech:
1. Ronald Reagan won the Cold War without firing a shot. These words of Margaret Thatcher could be applied to her as well. She matched Reagans military buildup with a strengthening of Britains defense forces. She was the strongest voice in Western Europe protesting against Soviet-ordered martial law against Solidarity in Poland. Thatcher took office in May, 1979, and Reagan in January, 1981, and they vanquished communism in less than a decade.
2. Thatcher fought a war to evict Argentina from the Falklands, and thereby compelled the Soviets to accept that the West would fight to defend itself. She supplied Blowpipe missiles to the Afghan resistance giving Reagan the justification to insist that American intelligence agencies supply them with the more effective Stinger missiles.
3. She prevented the European Union from accepting the legitimacy of Soviet incorporation of the Baltic countries inside its multi-national Gulag. She rallied the Europeans to ensure the installation of US missiles in Western Europe in 1984 to match the Soviet planting of SS-20s in the Soviet satellites. This was a decisive defeat for the Soviet Union in the Cold War, as they lost the hope of being able to employ nuclear blackmail against NATO, and of splitting the Atlantic alliance. The collapse of communism occurred only a few years later.
4. Thatcher, in fact, may well be regarded by history as more important than Reagan, in respect to economic reform. This is because recovery of the British economy in the 1980s started at a lower point, and occurred in a more left-wing country: while Jimmy Carter was fairly effective at ruining an economy, but was no match for 50 years of socialism and Labour government. Thatcher successfully battled not only Labour MPs, and timid Tories, but labor unions, as in the 84-85 miners strike. These domestic victories weakened the extreme left everywhere. Consider:
a. Loss-making industries were closed down or reduced in size. Manufacturing industries shed labor, often while increasing output, restructuring to meet foreign competition.
b. Privatization transformed inefficient state-owned industries into dynamic private sector enterprises.
c. Like Reagans revived US economy, Thatchers British economy was characterized by change, profitability, growth, better allocation of resources, and an entirely new economy based on the information revolution.
d. Thatcher championed capital ownership, Labour believed in turning workers against owners; we believe in turning workers into owners. Two-thirds of Britains state-owned industries were sold to the private sector, resulting in more efficient industries and wider capital ownership. Between 1979 and 1989, the proportion of the British public owning shares rose from seven percent to fully one-quarter.
e. Here is Thatchers Finance Minister, Nigel Lawson, pointing out some of the signs of a growing enterprise culture in Britain: an average increase of 500 new firms per weekafter deducting closures. There was a rise from little more than one million to over three million in the number of self-employed. The UK venture capitalist industry, which scarcely existed when we first took office, had by 1985 become twice as large as its counterparts in the rest of the European Community taken together.
5. Thatcher supported the vigorous virtues, such qualities as self-reliance, diligence, thrift, trustworthiness, and initiative that enable someone who exhibits them to live and work independently in society. Though they are not the only virtuescompassion might be called one of the softer virtuesthey are essential to the success of a free economy and a civil society, both of which rely on dispersed initiative and self-reliant citizens.
a. The world economy benefitted form Thatcherism and Reaganism, in that they had provided the world with successful models of free and deregulated economies. Tax cuts were Americas principal intellectual export; privatization was Britains. Of the two, privatization was the more important globally, since the Third World and post-communist economies were encumbered with a vast number of inefficient state industries.
b. In the Politburo archives can be found this unwitting tribute to Lady Thatcher in a 1986 conversation between Gorbachev and Alexander Natta, the General Secretary of the Italian Communist party:
Natta: At the same time we, the communists, having either overestimated or underestimated the functions of the welfare state, kept defending situations which, as it became clear only now, we should not have defended. As a result, a bureaucratic apparatus, which serves itself, has swelled. It is interesting that a certain similarity with your situation, which you call stagnation, can be seen here.
Gorbachev: Parkinsons law works everywhere. . . .
Natta: Any bureaucratization encourages the apparatus to protect its own interests and to forget about the citizens interests. I suppose that is exactly why the Rights demands of re-privatisation are falling on a fertile ground in Western public opinion.
c. Once the command economies of the Soviet Bloc collapsed in 1989, revealing the extraordinary bankruptcy of state planning, it was the Thatcher model that the new democracies mainly sought to emulate. In 1939 Finland and its southern neighbor Estonia were identical in many ways. Then, in 1940, the USSR occupied Estonia, and it remained under communist rule for 50 years. Here are the words of Mart Laar, Estonias former prime minister, stating what communism did to his country:
Look at what happened in this context during these fifty years and then you can understand how terrible the communist system really is. And its not only in the economy. This is in all fields of lifethe social structure, cultural standards, education, healthcare, or whatever. When you compare those two countries, which were exactly the same in 1939[,] in 1989, then you will find what communism really means, and how bad it is. Our economy, our nature, and our environment was [sic] destroyed.
The conclusion:
their economic and social differences grew so large that no informed person could honestly dispute the pernicious effect that communist rule had on occupied Estonia.
The Filter^: Finland and Estonia
In 1991 Estonia became capitalist, and experienced massive economic growth. They discovered the errors of progressive class warfare.
6. Lady Thatcher believed in the Anglo-American political tradition of ordered liberty, and her time in government brought forth the dormant incipient virtues dispersed authority, open debate, popular sovereignty, spontaneous social evolution in many new democracies, such as Estonia. They offer the best hope for Third World countries emerging from poverty and backwardness into a world of globalized opportunities.
a. European political structure is built upon a very different tradition of constructivist rationalism; the future is endangered by the failure of many conservatives to see the dangers in a European and global governance, popular with the US administration, that lacks democratic accountability and threatens liberal freedoms.
https://www.hillsdale.edu/news/imprimis/archive/issue.asp?year=2008&month=06
4/8/2013 Lady Thatcher passed on to her reward this morning.
"I've lost her now for sure
I won't see her no more
It's gonna be a drag, misery..."
"Misery," The Beatles
The following is based on that speech:
1. Ronald Reagan won the Cold War without firing a shot. These words of Margaret Thatcher could be applied to her as well. She matched Reagans military buildup with a strengthening of Britains defense forces. She was the strongest voice in Western Europe protesting against Soviet-ordered martial law against Solidarity in Poland. Thatcher took office in May, 1979, and Reagan in January, 1981, and they vanquished communism in less than a decade.
2. Thatcher fought a war to evict Argentina from the Falklands, and thereby compelled the Soviets to accept that the West would fight to defend itself. She supplied Blowpipe missiles to the Afghan resistance giving Reagan the justification to insist that American intelligence agencies supply them with the more effective Stinger missiles.
3. She prevented the European Union from accepting the legitimacy of Soviet incorporation of the Baltic countries inside its multi-national Gulag. She rallied the Europeans to ensure the installation of US missiles in Western Europe in 1984 to match the Soviet planting of SS-20s in the Soviet satellites. This was a decisive defeat for the Soviet Union in the Cold War, as they lost the hope of being able to employ nuclear blackmail against NATO, and of splitting the Atlantic alliance. The collapse of communism occurred only a few years later.
4. Thatcher, in fact, may well be regarded by history as more important than Reagan, in respect to economic reform. This is because recovery of the British economy in the 1980s started at a lower point, and occurred in a more left-wing country: while Jimmy Carter was fairly effective at ruining an economy, but was no match for 50 years of socialism and Labour government. Thatcher successfully battled not only Labour MPs, and timid Tories, but labor unions, as in the 84-85 miners strike. These domestic victories weakened the extreme left everywhere. Consider:
a. Loss-making industries were closed down or reduced in size. Manufacturing industries shed labor, often while increasing output, restructuring to meet foreign competition.
b. Privatization transformed inefficient state-owned industries into dynamic private sector enterprises.
c. Like Reagans revived US economy, Thatchers British economy was characterized by change, profitability, growth, better allocation of resources, and an entirely new economy based on the information revolution.
d. Thatcher championed capital ownership, Labour believed in turning workers against owners; we believe in turning workers into owners. Two-thirds of Britains state-owned industries were sold to the private sector, resulting in more efficient industries and wider capital ownership. Between 1979 and 1989, the proportion of the British public owning shares rose from seven percent to fully one-quarter.
e. Here is Thatchers Finance Minister, Nigel Lawson, pointing out some of the signs of a growing enterprise culture in Britain: an average increase of 500 new firms per weekafter deducting closures. There was a rise from little more than one million to over three million in the number of self-employed. The UK venture capitalist industry, which scarcely existed when we first took office, had by 1985 become twice as large as its counterparts in the rest of the European Community taken together.
5. Thatcher supported the vigorous virtues, such qualities as self-reliance, diligence, thrift, trustworthiness, and initiative that enable someone who exhibits them to live and work independently in society. Though they are not the only virtuescompassion might be called one of the softer virtuesthey are essential to the success of a free economy and a civil society, both of which rely on dispersed initiative and self-reliant citizens.
a. The world economy benefitted form Thatcherism and Reaganism, in that they had provided the world with successful models of free and deregulated economies. Tax cuts were Americas principal intellectual export; privatization was Britains. Of the two, privatization was the more important globally, since the Third World and post-communist economies were encumbered with a vast number of inefficient state industries.
b. In the Politburo archives can be found this unwitting tribute to Lady Thatcher in a 1986 conversation between Gorbachev and Alexander Natta, the General Secretary of the Italian Communist party:
Natta: At the same time we, the communists, having either overestimated or underestimated the functions of the welfare state, kept defending situations which, as it became clear only now, we should not have defended. As a result, a bureaucratic apparatus, which serves itself, has swelled. It is interesting that a certain similarity with your situation, which you call stagnation, can be seen here.
Gorbachev: Parkinsons law works everywhere. . . .
Natta: Any bureaucratization encourages the apparatus to protect its own interests and to forget about the citizens interests. I suppose that is exactly why the Rights demands of re-privatisation are falling on a fertile ground in Western public opinion.
c. Once the command economies of the Soviet Bloc collapsed in 1989, revealing the extraordinary bankruptcy of state planning, it was the Thatcher model that the new democracies mainly sought to emulate. In 1939 Finland and its southern neighbor Estonia were identical in many ways. Then, in 1940, the USSR occupied Estonia, and it remained under communist rule for 50 years. Here are the words of Mart Laar, Estonias former prime minister, stating what communism did to his country:
Look at what happened in this context during these fifty years and then you can understand how terrible the communist system really is. And its not only in the economy. This is in all fields of lifethe social structure, cultural standards, education, healthcare, or whatever. When you compare those two countries, which were exactly the same in 1939[,] in 1989, then you will find what communism really means, and how bad it is. Our economy, our nature, and our environment was [sic] destroyed.
The conclusion:
their economic and social differences grew so large that no informed person could honestly dispute the pernicious effect that communist rule had on occupied Estonia.
The Filter^: Finland and Estonia
In 1991 Estonia became capitalist, and experienced massive economic growth. They discovered the errors of progressive class warfare.
6. Lady Thatcher believed in the Anglo-American political tradition of ordered liberty, and her time in government brought forth the dormant incipient virtues dispersed authority, open debate, popular sovereignty, spontaneous social evolution in many new democracies, such as Estonia. They offer the best hope for Third World countries emerging from poverty and backwardness into a world of globalized opportunities.
a. European political structure is built upon a very different tradition of constructivist rationalism; the future is endangered by the failure of many conservatives to see the dangers in a European and global governance, popular with the US administration, that lacks democratic accountability and threatens liberal freedoms.
https://www.hillsdale.edu/news/imprimis/archive/issue.asp?year=2008&month=06
4/8/2013 Lady Thatcher passed on to her reward this morning.
"I've lost her now for sure
I won't see her no more
It's gonna be a drag, misery..."
"Misery," The Beatles
