So, do you come to praise Margaret Thatcher or bury her?

Perhaps you failed to notice the sad history of the 20th century. The socialist experiment didn't work anywhere it was tried. In most cases the result was tyranny and poverty.

Nonsense.

And if I were concerned with the sad history of the 20th century, I'd probably focus on how unbridled capitalism has moved from something worthwhile to something that will probably make socialistic experimentation look like a dream.

Conservatism, particularly the brand called American conservatism, is a disease polluting the Earth. We ought spend more time and effort battling it...than cancer.

Quite right. It worked well enough to kick Gob's arse out of Vietnam.

Well there's a compelling argument for a major revision to the known history.

Perhaps you should write a book.

what?
seriously?

you seem to have missed reading about quite a few countries

When the credit crunch happened Communist China bailed out Capitalist America, not the other way round. If you put ideology before facts you can believe anything.

Clearly you're referring to the Scandanavian Countries, particularly Denmark & Norway. Denmark indeed is an exception to the rule. Sweden to, but to a lesser extent. They reduced the cost of their government by a large margin starting a decade ago and are doing better now. Norway is propped up by their enormous petroleum revenues (they aren't at all shy about offshore drilling).

In a similar way Germany is an exception to the rule in social democratic Europe. I guess you could call that "quite a few" countries, however in terms of population and economic scale it is an insignificant fraction of the total.

From China to India to the emerging nations of Africa and the unhappy members of the former Soviet Empire, the socialist, planned economy experiment was indeed a dismal failure.

So how many exceptions do you need before the rule ceases to be a rule? You're basing this entirely on the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union failed because of a command economy. Spain and Portugal languished in poverty precisely because, although fascist rather than socialist, they had command economies. You are conflating socialism with command economies, and you're wrong, wrong, wrong.

George, George, George, where do I begin?



You think two decades wipes all traces of tectonic socio-politico-economico shifts from a nation's situation? Based on that idea alone I should just ignore every thought you express.

But let's go for lesson giving. At the time the UK and US shifted to the right, Australia shifted left. Where Thatcher's government declared war on union power so that it could make major changes to the economy. Hawke's government partnered with it and came to the 'Accord'. Both countries were beset by industrial action during the 1970s. Major reforms in Finance, govt bureaucracies, and industry were made in Aus and the UK that reverberate to today and laid the path both have followed since.

I'm less familiar with Reagonomics, but I doubt you would say that Reagan has no legacy in modern America.



This might make some sense if all those countries were in the same place on the socio-economic ladder 1979 as England, and if they had the same institutions, resources and social capital, but which of the three do you think has moved furthest away from where they were in 1979, and in which direction? Which of those nations' poorest are worse off than they were back then?



Ah! The straw man. Where have indicated I hate Thatcher? My sole
judgement was on page one where I said that based on the impact on the people most disadvantaged by her implementation of those reforms I considered her a 'poor manager of government'. Slanderous!

Obligatory swipe:
Apparently it's easier to talk **** than think.

George...

...first of all, what Izzy, Beth, Setanta, and Hingehead said.

But there is even more to the issue.

At some point, I think we will all finally get through our heads that capitalistic systems can be improved by an infusion of some socialistic ideas…just as socialistic systems can be improved by an infusion of ideas from capitalism.

Free enterprise…and validation of free enterprise success…is, in my opinion, essential to innovation and discovery. But we who espouse capitalism have allowed capitalism to go apeshit…allowed it to be abused to the point where we are getting more negative returns from our system than socialism is getting from its.

Certain areas of our economy have got to have a healthy infusion of socialism…with socialistic incentives commensurate with the “validation” of free enterprise success. “Medical care” is one such area. The fact that our medical system costs as much as it does; that its reach is so tentative and fragile; that needed drugs and procedures are denied to some because of capitalistic profit considerations…disgust me, and should disgust anyone with any sense of balance.

The conservative ideologues simply will not even consider the value of socialistic infusion...most will dismiss, as you did, the idea out-of-hand.

Give it more thought, George.

I agree with you about Spain & Portugal, but note that to the extent command economies contributed to their lack of growth it is noteworthy that most socialist economies have a similar top down character, though the details vary from country to country and this too has an adverse effect on growth. The whole collection of post colonial governments in Africa, with very few exceptions, embraced authoritarian socialistic development, wasting a generation in the process. Where growth is occurring now it is usually a result of free market economies.

Again, in terms of the both populations affected and the size of the economies involved the "exceptions" you cite and infer are but a very small portion of the whole. How do you explain the transformations occurring in China, Indonesia, Ghana, and India?

I certainly don't explain them by confusing socialism, a political system, with capitalism, an economic system. Spain and Portugal were not the only right-wing, non-socialist command economies. But i'm not going to trade "oh yeah, so there's" with you. If capitalist greed and rapacity are the alternative, it's rather quixotic to declare socialism a failure, always keeping in mind that one is an economic system and the other a political system.

I guess I stand on middle ground, or left-to middle ground here.

Of course "real socialism" was a failure everywhere, from China to Cuba to the USSR to Albania to Ethiopia to DDR to North Korea.
An economic failure, a social failure, a cultural failure.
Even in more moderate countries, like Yugoslavia, it didn't work, as we got to see.
And of course, Capitalism works better. But not without big flaws.

But one thing is the Capitalist system as a whole and another one is savage Capitalism as the so-called Washington Consensus promoted, and as the Reagan-Thatcher duo helped solidify in the horrible 80s.
When Capitalism goes unchecked, without some sort of social and cultural counterbalance, the result is growing unequality, social unrest and recurring crises.
Plus, the cultural heritage of the Washington Consensus -"wealth is virtue", I would resume it- besides all the damage it made to the social tissue, helped generate the lack of supervision of the financial system, which steemed the crisis of 2008.

At the moment we are at the low part of a long-run economic cycle (the so-called Kondratieff cycles).
Capitalism as it is now has shifted more and more resources into the financial-speculative system and less into production of goods and services. Profits are made but employment stalls and the well-being of people in many countries has been jeorpardized.
The last time the world fell into a low long-run economic cycle was between the two World Wars.
There is no World War to be made and no superpower is strong or wise enough to impose good rules for growth as the US did after WWII. But a change is necessary,
If the change comes through social reform and more counterbalances to savage Capitalism, the world will come out of this crisis as a better place. The medicine of the IMF and Frau Merkel will do no good: they're iatrogenic recipes that will make the ill still sicker.

If you want to mantain Capitalism, the better working economical system modern mankind has known, you've got to reform it. As it is, it does not deliver the necessary well-being to most people in the world.

Oddly enough, the Champions of Capitalism still think so ideologically that they imagine that the freer the markets, the more prosperous people will become. They do this when markets are distorted, oligopolies are common, information is not precise and finance has taken over production. They forget that economics is a social science, and can't do withour history, sociology or psychology.

You make excellent sense to me.

Final cover for a solid waste landfill

Is it also easier to dive bomb civilians than think, Gob1?

Always nice to have your personal analysis confirmed by someone with more indepth knowledge.

Both left and right: Thatcher’s undeniable influence on Australian politics
Geoffrey Robinson
Senior Lecturer, School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Deakin University

Source

Margaret Thatcher’s years as British prime minister from 1979 to 1990 coincided with an era of political upheaval in Australia. The exhaustion of Malcolm Fraser’s “Menziesian” liberalism was followed by the successful and pragmatic Labor governments of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating.

Both sides of Australian politics were influenced by the example of Thatcher, but her influence was most significant on the Labor party and the broader left. To the struggling Liberal party, Thatcher’s government provided a beacon of hope, just as Tony Blair did for Labor in the 2000s.

Australia even in the 1980s was a much more British society than now. British migrants were well-represented among Liberal activists, and many had left Britain at least partially in response to union power and non-white immigration – issues that contributed to Thatcher’s support. To many Australian conservatives, Thatcher seemed to provide an example of commitment politics: one that compared favourably to the temporising of the Fraser years.

There were however difficulties in the application of Thatcher’s formula to Australia. The contemporary image of Thatcher largely rests on her economic record, but much of her early support base rested on nationalism and social conservatism. In 1978 she empathised with white Britons who feared being “swamped” by migrants of a “different culture”.

In Australia, Thatcher’s aggressive social conservatism – she spoke of the “loony left” and legislated to prevent local authorities from the “promotion” of homosexuality – was counterproductive for the Liberal party. John Howard’s comments about Asian immigration in 1988 were, as he later admitted, politically costly. Nor could the Liberals in opposition compete with Bob Hawke’s tendency towards nationalism.

The Liberals were also often seduced by the spirit of Thatcher’s rhetorical radicalism rather than its more cautious substance. In 1983, Thatcher boasted that Britain’s National Health Service was “safe with us”. The Australian Liberals, however, tied themselves in knots over their opposition to Medicare.

Thatcher’s successes with privatisation excited the Australian right, but voters were unenthused. There was no Australian equivalent of council housing sales to provide a bonanza to voters. The Liberals also misread Thatcher’s successes on industrial relations. Australian unions were unpopular – although not as much as in Britain – but Labor under Bob Hawke appealed to voters as best equipped to manage them. The fact that Australian workplace regulation relied in large part on the eternally popular arbitration system, rather than union power as in Britain, weakened the case for labour market deregulation further.

In large part, then, Thatcher’s legacy was a costly one for the Australian right. The lessons of combat from government against a militant union movement and a radical Labour Party in the UK did not easily translate to Australia with its pacific unions and centrist Labor government.

In fact, Margaret Thatcher’s most direct impact on Australian politics was on the left. In these years the Australian labour movement was deeply informed by British debates. To many on the left, the Thatcher model represented the likely fate of Australia if the Hawke government was defeated. This fear guided those informed by the traditions of British unionism, such as a young Doug Cameron (now an ALP senator), but also much on the intellectual left which included many British migrants. Fear of an Australian version of “Thatcherism” made many on the left less critical of the Hawke government and enabled Labor to pursue a centrist course.

The experience of Thatcher also guided much of the left’s positive response. For many of the British left, Thatcher’s government was more than just a revived conservatism. Rather, she was the advocate of Thatcherism: a sustained project to remake British society. It reflected a deep-seated, “organic” crisis of the “Keynesian welfare state” that had emerged after World War II. A decade later John Howard earned a similar fascination from much of the left in Australia.

In Britain, this interpretation of Thatcherism was pioneered by the Communist party’s journal Marxism Today, in particular contributors such as Stuart Hall, and was echoed by its local equivalent the Australian Left Review. To Hall and his co-thinkers, Thatcherism’s popularity originated in errors in the practice of the left. Socialists, Hall and his colleagues argued, did not recognise the disillusionment of many working class people with the bureaucratic state, while British unions although industrially strong had not offered any alternative hegemonic vision.

In Australia, working class distrust of the state meant a preference for tax cuts over more government services. The Hawke government’s Accord with unions emphasised the maintenance of take-home pay over an enlarged public sector to the frustration of the traditional (and feminist) left.

Thatcher’s defeat of the UK miners' strike in the mid-1980s is seen as a watershed moment for ‘Thatcherism’ and its economic policies. EPA/Archive

The failure of British unions to defeat Thatcher seemed to demonstrate that the Australian way of cooperation with a Labor government was preferable. In the end, however, Australian unions found themselves locked in behind a Labor government whose economic orthodoxy was praised by Thatcher herself. By the early 1990s aspects of Thatcher’s legacy seemed attractive to Australian Labor politicians, in particular privatisation and the acceptance of deindustrialisation.

Yet some aspects of the left’s critique of Thatcherism would continue to inform the practice of Hawke and Keating’s Labor government. Hall argued for the left to fight the cultural battle against Thatcherism by an engagement with new social movements such as those for multiculturalism, environmentalism and gay rights.

Within limits, Australian Labor between 1983 and 1996 did take up the cause of these social movements. The Gillard Labor government has instead tended to acquiesce in Howard’s social conservatism around issues such as marriage equality and immigration.

Thatcherism was one element in the transformation of Australian society and economy during the 1980s. Thatcher’s local influence reflected not only the persistence of British-Australia into the 1980s on both the left and right sides of politics, but also the shared crisis of the Keynesian welfare state in both countries.

I more or less agree with you here. Mostly I believe the virtues of Capitalism, as the social & economic system you described, arise from the individual freedoms it involves. Similarly I attribute the persistent failures of Socialism (or any of the other organized top-down alternatives) to the lack of individual freedom and initiative that are a direct result of the "reforms" they impose.

My understanding of history is that the worst evils inflicted on humanity generally came from those among those who were sure they (alone) knew what was really good for everyone else and were determined to impose it on them. The problem, of course, is that our lives and characters are far more complex than the the relatively simple-minded doctrines and implementing regulations such authoritarians inflict on others to achieve their particular concept of perfection. An additional complication is that human nature is far more inventive and adaptable in seeking advantage than any of the regulatory structures created for the "reform" of social & economic systems by these self-appointed designers of perfection. In any contest between the regulator or the crooks, my money would be on the crooks.

In short I believe the best system is generally the least intrusive one and that the unintended (and usually adverse) side effects of most efforts at reform generally end up dominating their primary effects. Thus, even for necessary government controls, there are very few permanent solutions to any problem. Most are fairly quickly coopted by those whose behavior the systems were intended to regulate, and must be periodically restructured, just to start the game over again. In keeping with this, most of the prominent failures of authoritarian political & economic systems become readily understandable.

I fail to see how a guy who was a career military man...can feel the way you describe in this post, George.

Is there anything on the planet more "top-down organized?"

That's the US of A in a nutshell, Gob. And although the US isn't alone in inflicting those worst evils on humanity, they are right up there with the leaders. The really odd thing about that is that there has always been the bullshit routine, that many still believe, that the US is the good guy.

Right, Frank?