In honoring Margaret Thatcher, some of her greatest fans complain, "They don't make conservatives like that any more."
But they do. Problem is, the Republican right wing now running the party primaries would chew a Thatcher-type politician into unelectable shards.
It takes a brave conservative to engage in detail-oriented fights over what government should and shouldn't do. How much easier to draw simple-minded cartoons of bloated government and condemn any public program as "socialism." Ideological purists may shudder, but this hard process is called governing. [1]
Thatcher would have laughed at when Obamacare foes' called the reforms "a government takeover of health care." Recall how, in the heat of battle, the right waved Britain's National Health Service as a warning of terrible things awaiting American health care under the Affordable Care Act.
But here is what Thatcher wrote about the NHS in her memoir, "The Downing Street Years," after she had left the thick of politics: "I believed that the NHS was a service of which we could genuinely be proud. It delivered a high quality of care — especially when in it came to acute illnesses — and at a reasonably modest unit cost, at least compared with some insurance-based systems."
In Britain, doctors work for the government, making the NHS truly socialistic. As for government control of health care, Obamacare doesn't come close. But had candidate Obama likewise praised NHS to the skies, his consultants would have passed around smelling salts.
As prime minister, Thatcher raised the value added tax — a kind of national sales tax — to help pay for cuts in income tax rates. (She wasn't into borrowing money for tax cuts.) When Mitt Romney said he'd consider a similar tax during the Republican presidential primaries, Newt Gingrich called him a "European socialist."
Note that the founder of free-market economics, Adam Smith, regarded such taxes as a swell idea.
"Taxes on consumptions are best levied by way of excise," he wrote in his 1776 classic, "The Wealth of Nations." "They have the advantage of 'being paid imperceptibly.'"
Another Thatcher hero was the late conservative economist, Milton Friedman, hailed as Smith's spiritual heir. Conservatives often cite Friedman's view that the bigger the share of government spending in a national economy, the less free the people are. But, hmmm, at what point would government's share set off an alarm that freedom was really in peril?
Friedman offered a number: 60 percent of the gross domestic product. Right now our government spending — federal, local and state put together — accounts for about 35 percent of GDP, well below the panic point.
Thatcher revered Friedrich Hayek's "Road to Serfdom," a book conservatives raise high as the great repudiation of socialism. One hopes but can't assume that their praise extends to the parts where Hayek defends a minimum wage, guaranteed health coverage and other government programs.
Hayek wrote that "there can be no doubt that some minimum of food, shelter, and clothing, sufficient to preserve health and the capacity to work, can be assured to everybody ... Nor is there any reason why the state should not assist the individuals in providing for those common hazards of life against which few can make adequate provision." For insurable risks, he added, "The case for the state's helping to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance is very strong."
However one feels about Thatcher's politics, there's no question that she chose crusades and framed arguments with great care. She didn't talk of drowning governments in bathtubs. For her pragmatism, much of today's Republican right would have panned Thatcher as "socialist," "statist" and, heaven forfend, "European" — though they now hail her.
To find out more about Froma Harrop, and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.
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DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM
[1]Awkward phrasing
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Ma'am;... Thatcher's deal with the devil must have run out, and the good they do die young... Why are you bothering to save the right religious reactionaries from themselves??? Life is an intelligence test, and those people will find their lives shortened by their stupidity once they have managed to make the government as short sighted as they... And what of that nonsense about the sales tax??? It always falls disproportionately on the poor, and leaves the rich untouched since it takes such a small portion of the income of the wealthy to meet their needs...The real idea of taxation is not to have government supported by those who know the least benefit from it; but to get the rich by any and all means to pay for some of the benefit they alone have recieved from the commonwealth...I can't tell if you are technically a conservative or a liberal; but I do believe your thinking is as shallow as a mirror... When you try to get to the bottom of it, how close it all must seem...
Thanks...Sweeney
Comment: #1
Posted by: James A, Sweeney
Mon Apr 8, 2013 12:34 PM
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Ma'am; .. There is no doubt that some minimum of food, shelter, and clothing, sufficient to preserve health and the capacity for work, can be assured for everybody...
No doubt; even with only a fraction engaged in actual production such minimums can be assured; but who shall determine what those minimums are??? If you are running your country with a view to international hegemony, you are likely to set that minimum quite low... You may be inclined to cut corners on necessities for the long range good of the country, such as education, or health care; and who are such cuts good for???...And what is health and the capacity to work??? Would the rich be contented with lives only healthy, that give them only the capacity of work??? We might well look at people as lab rats in a great experiment to find out how deprived their lives might become, of understanding and happiness before they surrender to suicide... What can we give them to keep them going and motivated and healthy enough to be productive, but perhaps not quite healthy enough to reproduce, or retire..
Our individuation is not a quality socialism has ever denied, but has rather shone a light on... Are not the poor only too much like the rich, taking the rich as examples though it leads them into dissipation, poverty and immorality???...We might all be happy if our life goals were more realistic, but is it not our desire to change our reality to fit our goals rather than forever settling for less???
Look at Europe with the Socialism of almost enough, but not quite total control of your own life... People breed themselves out of such meaningless existences... If you admit that capitalism is only worse because it so often inspires people to violence or a revolting nihilism that denies all life and all meaning, what can you do about it but shrug???...
My job when I did it came complete with a remarkable brutality... You should never imagine that those who build your buildings do so because they are nice and happy people... They carry their misery upon their backs like a camel carries its hump...But one thing they have above almost all other people... No one can deny to them their contribution to the final product...People joke about being replaced by a trained monkey because they are working for peanuts, but they know, as others do not...
When you make a task so meaningless that you have to be barely human to do it, and do it because you are cheaper than the maching that might do it better, and it is all the cheaper because it is so meaningless, and meaningless because the part is impossible to connect to the whole, then the job will not simply be the process where by ones life and labor is aliented from one, but essential meaning as well...
Meaning is value, and value is money; and missing the meaning you cannot demand the money, so the cost of every working person is reduced to what it takes to keep them alive...Yet, life without meaning is no life at all, and because such people without lives are forced to sell their minutes, their days, their years for little value, they learn at some point that they have been had...
We are all had; even those who know what they do, compensated with meaning rather than value are in the end forced to sell cheap... What is the value and meaning of all these lives bought and sold on the market for their lowest price driven down by necessity???
Meaning is a spiritual quality as value is a physical...In every other sense, meaning and value are interchangeable; but when people start to look for the minimum necessary for our bare survival with the suggestion that this is moral, and behind it all lies the fact that we have no say in the matter, not even as a matter of negotiation, then it is not moral, and IS everything but moral... That is why Eugene Debs said: I would rather vote for something and not get it, than not vote for something and get it....
What is given can be taken, and what people take with the force of their wills, conscious of their power, aware of their own value cannot be easily taken from them...Those who seek to abstract our lives and consider them abstractly when they are to us the only reality, the meaning of all meaning, they do us a great diservice, and an absolute injury...
Is one better than another because they seek to find our minimum while another wants our lives sold below even that??? They are all the same, making their money by selling what we cannot live without cheap, so cheap that the process cannot be anything but demeaning to us, and that is not the name of our game as human beings... If we must sell X amount of meaning to purchace Y amount of life, then the life we buy must be equal to the meaning we sell, and when we are selling young lives cheap to buy old lives dear it is hardly a fair trade...
In thousands of transactions we are sold cheap, and transformed in the process into something less dear and desirable, more fickle, jaded, and vapid with every day, sour on life and wishing life away with every breath we take... Is this how you want to live??? Would you not prefer to live one moment as a moth on fire than chilled, and longing every moment for the warmth of life undeniable??? No one loves a victim, and this society that makes us victims should do so with a passion; use us, burn us, and destroy us before thinking to show us the minimum of human mercy...Don't pity us... Free us... Give us Justice...
Thanks....Sweeney
Comment: #2
Posted by: James A, Sweeney
Tue Apr 9, 2013 9:17 AM
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