Thatchers 80th Birthday - Road to the Middle Class

THEY CELEBRATED the 80th birthday last night of Margaret Thatcher, the other half of the tag team of Reagan and Thatcher. She was a scholarship girl, daughter of the corner grocer who went to Cambridge University and then into national politics.

Her great life achievement was to turn Britain away from the disastrous expert-led death spiral of the 1970s when the economy was utterly devastated by political power and rent-seeking, all in the name of social progress and compassion.

Now she is 80 and we all live in the afterglow of her hard-won achievements. The success of the New Labour Blair government is based on the continuing good economic growth that was founded in the hard years of 1979-1984.

But the hard truth is that, while the British Conservative Party solved the economic problem of productivity in the private sector the British Labour Party under Tony Blair has failed to solve the economic problem of productivity in the public sector. And that is too bad for the British people.

It is said that you only get strong leaders when you need them. At least, the Anglosphere seems to throw up strong leaders in a time of need. The British certainly got their strong leader when they needed one in Margaret Thatcher, and just in the nick of time.

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

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Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

What Liberals Think About Conservatives

[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican

Liberal Coercion

[T]he Liberal, and still more the subspecies Radical... more than any other in these latter days seems under the impression that so long as he has a good end in view he is warranted in exercising over men all the coercion he is able[.]
Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

US Life in 1842

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Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

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David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Faith and Politics

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Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

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Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

Conservatism's Holy Grail

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Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

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