Are there any suggested books which study the (mainly economic) policies of Margeret Thatcher and the effects of them?
I'm someone fairly convinced of the positive effects of limiting government and taxes (the platform she and Reagan ran on), however, I know theres a bit of a gray area as to whether they really did that, or whether they did more harm then good. It's incredibly difficult to hear an explanation in England, where I live, as due to the nature of politics people seem consistently bias, mostly against her, but sometimes hyping up her a bit too much.
My main desire is to have something to say when I hear something like 'Damn thatcher, she closed all the coal mines and steel manufacturing and ruined this country'.
Thatcher's monetarism was a disaster.
United Kingdom needs it's own Ludwig von Mises Institute too. And Ireland, Australia and New Zealand too.
Hey, Canada already has it's own!
As far as a I can see she was our Reagan.
They're both the perfect strawmen for anti-capitalist 'intellectuals'.
margeret thatcher's england was....MAADDNNNESS!!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJOLwy7un3U
Ambition is a dream with a V8 engine - Elvis Presley
I always found Thatcher to have been far better than Reagan. She had all one could look for in a politician, and yet failed to make a dent in the UK’s long-run orientation. Far from being a perfect straw man, she’s proof that even with balls of steel, the state can’t be steered form the inside, or at least not in that fashion.
As for monetarism, it can be said to have been a ‘failure’ only in the sense that any contraction of the monetary supply which bring a recession is a failure. All the failure there was that it was abandoned before the recession it was bringing about had run its course. But that is politics, I’m afraid.
Personally, now I think that Thatcher could have used her great charisma and willpower to decentralize political power in the UK, helping it turn into something like a coalition of communes along the lines of the crown dependencies, rather than privatize, at great cost, some public enterprises. Still, one of the few worthy politicians of the last century.
Margaret Thatcher justified some of her partial liberalizations by saying that it helped increased total tax revenues and thus helped her triple social spending.
Does anybody think the unusual backfiring nature of some market policies is that they make the state more efficient?
After all, if growth of state depends on growth of private capital, then the state will do everything to allow private capital to grow, and thus as a result be able to expand the welfare state, the warfare state, the industrial control state and the police state even more!
That's what Mises meant when he said that even the government was a capitalist institution. The Cloward Piven strategy was stupid, because putting as many people as possible on welfare rolls would not bankrupt the government but make government even more dependent on capital and on the terms set by capital.
Yes. These Hayek-inspired socialdemocrats(Thatcher and Reagan) have just prolonged paralytic lifetime of the state for a couple more years/decades. I'm quite sure that by this recession politicians are forced to do it again and everything will start again.