Margaret Thatcher is dead.

[Ben Kenobi]

Reagan didn't win ****. Where the hell do these stupid kids get this stuff?

Yeah, this whole thing about the Soviet Union collapsing. Never happened.

[Sava]

Hell, Reagan wasn't even the President when the USSR fell apart and it happened because of the USSR's own internal problems. In no way, shape, or form did Reagan "win" the cold war. That's just bull**** straight out of the right wing alternate universe and I doubt HC was even alive when there was a USSR. Further bull**** was Reg claiming Thatcher "brought Britain back from the brink". I had/have loads of family who lived in Britain in the 20's-70's and I spent most summers in the 80's in Britain and I can tell you that not only was Britain not on the brink (though there was a shift in traditional business due to the lose of traditional markets due to decolonization) but that many of her policies made matters worse. Especially in Scotland and northern England and worse they were designed to do so because she believed doing anything to hurt the opposition, including deliberately destroying whole industries, was politically good for her even if they were terrible for the country as a whole.

I agree. I think HC was just trolling Oerdin. I'd be concerned, but not surprised, if he wasn't.

The cold war was won by a succession of Democratic and Republican presidents. Only retards in the Republican base think otherwise.

[Sava]

Thanks for supporting my point BK.

Sometimes, I think you are just an elaborate troll...

[Dinner]

Privatization is pretty much always good.

It depends on how they're carried out. In places like Mexico and Russia they were used to enrich a few kleptocrates and represent the lose of vast amounts of public capital and resources while UK, at least, didn't have that problem and instead Thatcher did fire sales to any bidder no matter how unqualified or under capitalized resulting in the vast majority of them going belly up just due to the shock. Thatcher also pretty much single handly killed the British motor vehicle industry which was the second largest in the world in the 1970's and the ***** largely did it on purpose because they're union made up the backbone of the opposition. In other words she deliberately destroyed the nation's greatest industrial asset for short term political gain. She should have gone with the slow & steady approach which France took with it's automakers and as a result the French manufacturers are still here and still providing both value and employment where as Thatcher killed just about all the UK ones.

[Ben Kenobi]

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/344938/anti-declinist-mark-steyn

Mrs. Thatcher’s predecessor as prime minister, the amiable but forgotten Sunny Jim Callaghan, once confided to a friend of mine that he thought Britain’s decline was irreversible and that the government’s job was to manage it as gracefully as possible. By 1979, even this modest aim seemed beyond the capabilities of the British establishment, and the nation turned to a woman who was one of the few even in a supposedly “conservative” party not to subscribe to the Callaghan thesis. She reversed the decline, at home and overseas. The Falklands War, inconsequential in and of itself, had a huge global significance: After Vietnam, the fall of the Shah, Cuban troops in Africa, and Soviet annexation of real estate from Cambodia to Grenada, the British routing of the Argentine junta stunned everyone from the politburo in Moscow to their nickel ’n’ dime clients in the presidential palaces, all of whom had figured the “free world” no longer had any fight in it.

As for the domestic front, on the silver jubilee of her premiership, I wrote an assessment in the Telegraph:


Just after the Fall of Thatcher, I was in the pub enjoying a drink with her daughter Carol after a little light radio work. A fellow patron, a “radical” “poet”, decided to have a go at her in loco parentis, which is Latin for “in the absence of her loco parent”. After reciting a long catalogue of Mrs Thatcher’s various crimes, he leant into Carol, nose to nose, and summed it all up: “Basically, your mum just totally smashed the working classes.”

Carol was a jolly good sport about it, as always. And it has to be said that this terrible indictment loses a lot of its force when you replace “Vatcher” — a word the snarling tribunes of the masses could effortlessly spit down the length of the bar — with “your mum”.

On the other hand, he had a point: basically, her mum did just totally smash the working classes.

That’s to say, she understood that the biggest threat to any viable future for Britain was a unionized public sector that had awarded itself a lifestyle it wasn’t willing to earn. So she picked a fight with it, and made sure she won. In the pre-Thatcher era, union leaders were household names, mainly because they were responsible for everything your household lacked. Britain’s system of government was summed up in the unlovely phrase “beer and sandwiches at Number Ten” — which meant union grandees showing up at Downing Street to discuss what it would take to persuade them not to go on strike, and being plied with the aforementioned refreshments by a prime minister reduced to the proprietor of a seedy pub, with the Cabinet as his barmaids.

In 1990, when Mrs. Thatcher was evicted from office by her ingrate party’s act of matricide, the difference she’d made was such that in all the political panel discussions on TV that evening no producer thought to invite any union leaders. No one knew their names anymore.

That’s the difference between a real Terminator, and a poseur like Schwarzenegger.

As to the force of her personality, at the Commonwealth Conference in (I think) Vancouver a couple of decades ago, they had a “dress-down Friday” thing for the final day: the chaps from Oz, Canada, Belize, Papua New Guinea, and whatnot showed up in slacks and open-necked shirts, and then Mrs Thatcher came downstairs dressed in the usual big blue power suit with the Eighties shoulder pads. I think it was Bob Hawke, the Aussie PM, who observed, “Forty-nine blokes in the right dress code, and one woman who isn’t. And she made us feel like the ones who’d got it wrong.”

The term “rest in peace” doesn’t seem quite right for Margaret Thatcher. I hope upstairs they’re getting out an extra large tumbler, and readying for some vigorous debate into the small hours.

[Hauldren Collider]

OIAW

[Ben Kenobi]

The cold war was won by a succession of Democratic and Republican presidents. Only retards in the Republican base think otherwise.

Carter couldn't even stand up to Iran let alone the Soviet Union.

[Sava]

It depends on how they're carried out.

Nope. Privatization is never good. That's the whole point. It's only good for the people who gain control over valuable national assets. It's bad for the citizenry, it's bad for the country and it's bad for the consumers. The only real gains that can be had in productivity are in cutting labor costs by lowering wages. Lower wages means less consumers... or consumers with less disposable income. When the modern economy is based heavily on consumer spending... privatization is worse for the economy overall.

[Sava]

Carter couldn't even stand up to Iran let alone the Soviet Union.

The only major difference between the two parties in the approach to the Soviet Union came with Reagan's massive spending program. Personally, I think the SU would have eventually collapsed without such spending. It's an inherently flawed and unsustainable ideology. It was revolution without much thought to how to run a country.

But it sounds like you are saying Soviet-style Communism was a viable set of policies that would have succeeded if not for that pesky Reagan.

[Dinner]

I'm not glossing over it, the country was broken as hell and it took a revolution to bring it back to life. Yes that was an incredibly painful process, but when we compare Britain today to Britain in the seventies, I don't see how anyone can claim it's not an improvement. It's also worth pointing out that many of the things she's blamed for such as the move away from manufacturing leading to the impoverishment of the working class north were going to happen anyway. How exactly would a heavy UK manufacturing industry today compete with China or India?

The same way Germany does, I imagine. Also, no the country wasn't broken though it did need some reforms for the strike laws though much of the problems in the 1970's where international in origin such as the oil shock problems which lead to most of the inflation.

[snoopy369]

Nope. Privatization is never good. That's the whole point. It's only good for the people who gain control over valuable national assets. It's bad for the citizenry, it's bad for the country and it's bad for the consumers. The only real gains that can be had in productivity are in cutting labor costs by lowering wages. Lower wages means less consumers... or consumers with less disposable income. When the modern economy is based heavily on consumer spending... privatization is worse for the economy overall.

Sava, the problem is that the government isn't very good at running companies, and when it is running them it tends to do just as bad things as when they're public companies - but they also forbid competition. What's the difference between enriching Ma Bell's owners or keeping BTT's state appointed controllers in office? At least Ma Bell had to run an efficient company.

I don't mind some thing being publicly owned (roads, schools, etc. - things that won't be efficiently run by the market due to their not being sufficient individual incentive to do them well) but most companies should not be publicly owned, no matter where you fall on the political spectrum. Thatcher wasn't "putting it to the working class" by privatizing various industries - she was putting it to the _political_ class whose careers were built around keeping those companies public and running them to their own advantage.

The union-busting was probably necessary as well, as their unions had grown too powerful - and not necessarily in favor of the working man, but in favor of their management. Not to say unions don't have their value and their place, but even a staunch liberal should recognize it is possible for them to become a detriment to society as a whole, and not just to the rich.

Regardless of your political stance, I think Margaret Thatcher deserves some respect as someone who really wasn't afraid to stand up for her ideals, and to stand up for her country. She's one of the last to really stand up for what she thinks is right, rather than taking sides like we do now. If our leaders truly believed in helping America rather than playing partisan nonsense games, we'd be a lot better off.

[snoopy369]

The same way Germany does, I imagine. Also, no the country wasn't broken though it did need some reforms for the strike laws though much of the problems in the 1970's where international in origin such as the oil shock problems which lead to most of the inflation.

Germany isn't Britain, Oerdin. Britain doesn't have nearly the natural resources or convenient central location to play manufacturer. Britain should stick with what it's good at, rather than trying to be something it's not.

[kentonio]

The same way Germany does, I imagine.

Germany and the UK are very different.

Also, no the country wasn't broken though it did need some reforms for the strike laws though much of the problems in the 1970's where international in origin such as the oil shock problems which lead to most of the inflation.

The UK was completely broken, which is why we had been suffering through 3 day electricity supply, endless strikes paralyzing essential services and an economy in the toilet. We weren't described as the 'sick man of Europe' for nothing.

[kentonio]

Germany isn't Britain, Oerdin. Britain doesn't have nearly the natural resources or convenient central location to play manufacturer. Britain should stick with what it's good at, rather than trying to be something it's not.

Bingo.

[Dinner]

Yeah, this whole thing about the Soviet Union collapsing. Never happened.

Who was President in 1991? Hint: Not Reagan. Also, In the last 20 years there have been tones of analysis about the collapse of the Soviet Union and it was having internal economic difficulties since at least 1970. It would have collapsed all on its own and in fact did collapse all on its own. Trying to claim some foreign politician was responsible is dumb even for you, Ben.