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

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?"

It's a voluntary organization,

Was Thatcher a 'Champion of Freedom and Democracy'? Don't. Be. Silly.

The reactions and tributes to Margaret Thatcher's death have, perhaps above all else, illustrated the way in which modern conservatives have emptied the words 'freedom' and 'liberty' of all meaning and import.

"The world has lost a true champion of freedom and democracy," declaimed Nancy Reagan.

"She believed in the power of liberty, individual freedom and the rule of law," argued former Tory minister Virginia Bottomley.

"The freedom of the individual stood at the core of her beliefs," claimed Germany's very own Iron Lady, Angela Merkel, while Poland's foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorski, called Thatcher a "fearless champion of liberty".

The Economist magazine hailed the late Tory leader's "willingness to stand up to tyranny" and "bet on freedom".

And it wasn't just card-carrying conservatives who lined up to laud Thatcher as an unflinching defender and promoter of democracy; self-professed liberals joined in with the encomiums too. Echoing Nancy Reagan, US president Barack Obama, for instance, described Britain's Iron Lady as "one of the great champions of freedom and liberty".

I suspect, however, that the citizens of countries such as Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Iraq, South Africa and Chile might disagree. The inconvenient truth for Thatcher fans is that the freedom-loving, democracy-defending British premier was a close friend and admirer of the thugs, thieves, despots and racists who ruled over those nations in the 1980s.

"In Pakistan, Margaret Thatcher was best known for supporting General Zia ul Haq's military dictatorship," tweeted Time magazine's Pakistan correspondent Omar Waraich yesterday, referring to the Iron Lady's anticommunist alliance with the country's vicious, Islamist dictator. In a speech at a banquet hosted by Zia in 1981, Thatcher praised the general's "courage and skill" and toasted "the health and happiness of His Excellency". She made no reference to the need for democracy or elections in the self-styled 'Islamic Republic".

Consider also the case of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Remember the infamous Al Yamamah arms deal with the corrupt and totalitarian Saudis, signed by the Thatcher government in the mid-eighties and described by the Campaign Against The Arms Trade (CAAT) as "the largest ever UK arms contract with a foreign customer" and by the Financial Times as "the biggest [UK] sale ever of anything to anyone"? Well, she was just batting for British business, right? Wrong. Thatcher shamelessly praised the Saudi regime, an absolute monarchy and exporter of Islamist terror, as "a strong force for moderation and stability" at a Chatham House conference in 1993, three years after leaving office. "I am a great admirer of Saudi Arabia," she proclaimed, adding: "I have no intention of meddling in that country's internal affairs." How the repressed women of Saudi Arabia, denied not just the right to vote but the right to drive, must have cheered this supposed feminist icon back in 1993.

How about General Suharto of Indonesia, whose 32-year dictatorship was rightly described by the New York Times as "one of the most brutal and corrupt of the 20th century"? Suharto's military coup in 1965 was followed by the torture and killing of around 500,000 suspected Communists in Indonesia; his invasion and occupation of East Timor in 1975 resulted in the deaths of around 250,000 men, women and children on the island - yet the liberty-loving Thatcher later celebrated this blood-soaked Indonesian tyrant as "one of our very best and most valuable friends".


http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/mehdi-hasan/margaret-thatcher_b_3042342.html

Perhaps the reason here is that you don't understand much about "the military".

It's a voluntary organization, and the parts that are controlled are clearly defined , purposeful, and limited.

Independent thought and action are generally rewarded (at least they were in Naval Aviation),

... and conformity in peripheral things and ideas is a lot less than I have observed in the business world.

Perhaps that is your way of saying, "I have no real counter to what you just said, Frank, so I am going to pretend the problem is with your understanding of the military."

Re: Frank Apisa (Post 5300732)
Did you ever serve in any military organization? If so which and in what capacity?

I didn't suggest military organizations weren't authoritarian at all.

However, as I noted their purpose and scope are very limited, they are voluntary,

...and they don't run economies or embrace whole populations, here or anywhere.

I don't believe for a moment that either our economy or our society would be better off if they were run as military organizations. That I served in a military organization has nothing whatever to do with the points under discussion about socialism and capitalism. It appears to me you are merely searching hard for some peripheral matter to quibble about.

Evidently you have nothing of import to say about the main point in my earlier statement, and are instead looking for unrelated trivia (my past professional experience) to spout off about your own prejudices, under the pretense that this has anything at all to do with the point under discussion.

My boss was Curtis E. LeMay.

If you think we're done with neoliberalism, think again

The global application of a fraudulent economic theory brought the west to its knees. Yet for those in power, it offers riches


George Monbiot
The Guardian, Monday 14 January 2013 20.30 GMT


How they must bleed for us. In 2012, the world's 100 richest people became $241 billion richer. They are now worth $1.9 trillion: just a little less than the entire output of the United Kingdom.

This is not the result of chance. The rise in the fortunes of the super-rich is the direct result of policies. Here are a few: the reduction of tax rates and tax enforcement; governments' refusal to recoup a decent share of revenues from minerals and land; the privatisation of public assets and the creation of a toll-booth economy; wage liberalisation and the destruction of collective bargaining.

The policies that made the global monarchs so rich are the policies squeezing everyone else. This is not what the theory predicted. Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and their disciples – in a thousand business schools, the IMF, the World Bank, the OECD and just about every modern government – have argued that the less governments tax the rich, defend workers and redistribute wealth, the more prosperous everyone will be. Any attempt to reduce inequality would damage the efficiency of the market, impeding the rising tide that lifts all boats. The apostles have conducted a 30-year global experiment, and the results are now in. Total failure.

Before I go on, I should point out that I don't believe perpetual economic growth is either sustainable or desirable. But if growth is your aim – an aim to which every government claims to subscribe – you couldn't make a bigger mess of it than by releasing the super-rich from the constraints of democracy.

Last year's annual report by the UN Conference on Trade and Development should have been an obituary for the neoliberal model developed by Hayek and Friedman and their disciples. It shows unequivocally that their policies have created the opposite outcomes to those they predicted. As neoliberal policies (cutting taxes for the rich, privatising state assets, deregulating labour, reducing social security) began to bite from the 1980s onwards, growth rates started to fall and unemployment to rise.

The remarkable growth in the rich nations during the 50s, 60s and 70s was made possible by the destruction of the wealth and power of the elite, as a result of the 1930s depression and the second world war. Their embarrassment gave the other 99% an unprecedented chance to demand redistribution, state spending and social security, all of which stimulated demand.

Neoliberalism was an attempt to turn back these reforms. Lavishly funded by millionaires, its advocates were amazingly successful – politically. Economically they flopped.

Throughout the OECD countries taxation has become more regressive: the rich pay less, the poor pay more. The result, the neoliberals claimed, would be that economic efficiency and investment would rise, enriching everyone. The opposite occurred. As taxes on the rich and on business diminished, the spending power of both the state and poorer people fell, and demand contracted. The result was that investment rates declined, in step with companies' expectations of growth.

The neoliberals also insisted that unrestrained inequality in incomes and flexible wages would reduce unemployment. But throughout the rich world both inequality and unemployment have soared. The recent jump in unemployment in most developed countries – worse than in any previous recession of the past three decades – was preceded by the lowest level of wages as a share of GDP since the second world war. Bang goes the theory. It failed for the same obvious reason: low wages suppress demand, which suppresses employment.

...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/14/neoliberal-theory-economic-failure

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.

You use the term "real socialism," as though you were exclusively privy to a definition of socialism, and then you list a series of Marxist states. That Marxist states are socialist is not entirely unreasonable*, but it is not evidence that all socialist states must of necessity be only Marxist states.