Thirty Years After Thatcher

TODAY LONDON Telegraph columnist Simon Heffer is a crusty curmudgeon of a columnist, the Voice of Middle England railing against a Conservative Party that isn’t conservative enough.

But in 1979, thirty years ago this weekend, Heffer was just 19, and was voting in a British general election for the first time. The satirical lefty Private Eye rubbished the moment by showing newly elected Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher bellowing at an old man: "Wake up! It’s a new dawn for Britain!"

But the young Heffer wasn’t put off.

It echoed a feeling I had at five in the morning on May 4, as I drove back in a cool misty dawn through the countryside after an election party. The collectivist nightmare was over. A Britain of endless strikes, food subsidies, third-rate products and jobbery was, suddenly, consigned to history. If there has been a better time to be 19 than in 1979, I wait to be told.

Thirty years later, the astonishing thing is that the educated elite didn’t get the message. That is the meaning of the Obama presidency. It’s back to political meddling in everything—even Air Force One! It’s back to coddling the unions with Card Check. It’s back to bailing out declining industries. It’s back to printing money to get out of a jam. It’s back to the government “backing winners” with the current fashionable notion of green jobs.

The lesson of Reagan and Thatcher is that you cannot trust the economy to politicians. That’s because they don’t have a clue about business, and don’t have a clue about finance.

But they do know how to print money and they do know how to suborn the bankers into floating their paper. Unfortunately.

The next conservative revolution will be a bigger one than the last one. The Reagan-Thatcher revolution was about freeing up the economy from the dead hand of government. It worked until the politicians got their hands back on the throat of the businessman and the consumer.

But the next conservative revolution will be bigger. Because politicians don’t know how to run “public services” either. The next conservative revolution will be a revolution of public services. It will look something like this:

We will reform government pensions so that average people save for retirement with Vanguard and Fidelity, not Social Security.
We will reform government health care so that average people direct their own health care, backed up by some sort of catastrophic insurance.
We will reform government education so that people only get the education they need to get the skills they need. Then they get out and get a job.
We will reform government welfare so that there is no government involvement except during catastrophe like war, famine, or depression.

Today, that agenda seems incredible. But it will come. It will come not because we want it but because there is no other way. There is no other way because politicians are hopeless at everything except making war. When will it come? The sooner the better. As the Fram oil filter guy said, you can pay me now, or you can pay me later.

But the moment in 1979 when a grocer’s daughter became the first woman became prime minister of Britain and ended its Winter of Discontent, that moment will live forever.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Living Under Law

Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

German Philosophy

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West

Knowledge

Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

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[In the] higher Christian churches� they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Living Law

The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

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