Elizabeth Warren is probably most recognizable for her schtick that the deck is stacked against the average American and that our economic model is becoming ever more unfair. On that, Ms. Warren, I and the latest applicant for the republican presidential nomination, Carly Fiorina, all agree.
There is no question that the ever mounting regulation and mandated costs are making it more difficult to open and operate businesses in this country, and that is the alpha and omega of economic opportunity for all Americans. According to Carly Fiorina, it is crony capitalism that is at the heart of this huge threat to our economy:
The former Hewlett Packard CEO also claimed to have the expertise needed to reform bureaucracies, an important point in light of her belief that “the government is one giant, unaccountable, corrupt bureaucracy.” She went even further than that at times, showing signs that she might run as a sort of conservative Elizabeth Warren, flashing some of the anti-corporate sentiment that has made the Massachusetts senator a darling of the Left. “Look, crony capitalism is alive and well.
Elizabeth Warren, of course, is wrong about what to do about it,” Fiorina said. “She claims that the way to solve crony capitalism is more complexity, more regulations, more legislation, worse tax codes, and of course the more complicated government gets and it’s really complicated now, the less the small and the powerless can deal with it.” Fiorina made that point while denouncing the net neutrality regulations recently approved by the Federal Communications Commission in a 3-2 vote.
“The dirty little secret of that regulation, which is the same dirty little secret of Obamacare or Dodd-Frank or all of these other huge complicated pieces of regulation or legislation, is that they don’t get written on their own,” she said. “They get written in part by lobbyists for big companies who want to understand that the rules are going to work for them. . . . Who was in the middle of arguing for net neutrality? Verizon, Comcast, Google, I mean, all these companies were playing. They weren’t saying ‘we don’t need this;’ they were saying ‘we need it.’”
Fiorina suggested that large companies, by backing such regulations, have emerged as an enemy of the small businesses run out of people’s houses and garages. “Google started out that way too, in a dorm room, but they seem to have forgotten that,” she said. They also comprise part of a “political class” that is “disconnected” from most Americans.
“The vast majority of people . . . believe there is a political class that is totally disconnected from their lives and that’s stacking the deck against them,” Fiorina said. It’s a diagnosis of American politics that is appropriate to her biography. “It’s interesting, people out there are not at all troubled that I haven’t held elected office; in fact, the people I run into consider it a great asset,” Fiorina said.
It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages.
Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature & Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Vol 1, 1776
Adam Smith was the father of modern economics and the first proponent of free market, laissez-faire capitalism. He promoted free trade as the world, then experiencing its first massive expansion in wealth as a result of global trade, began to move from mercantilism towards something approaching his vision. So what does that have to do with my supper?
I just had a quite filling repast -- fresh green beans and a bit of diced sweet onion cooked with a slice of bacon, marinated in the bacon fat, then spiced with cayenne pepper, paprika, salt, and black pepper, all washed down with a cup of tea flavored with lime juice and heather honey. Delicious, filling, and . . . only possible because of globalism, capitalism and trade.
The only thing local was the sweet onion. From whence did all else come?
Green beans - shipped fresh from somewhere in Central America
Bacon - probably Virginia
Cayenne Pepper - probably Mexico
Black Pepper - probably India
Paprika - probably south central Europe or perhaps Turkey
Salt - probably Minnesota, with its huge salt mines
Green Tea - China
Lime Juice - Florida
Heather Honey - Scotland
All of the above came in containers made variously of glass, plastic, cardboard and metals from all over the world.
All came to a store near me by transport using fossil fuels.
All of that allowed me to make a meal that probably cost me about $1.25 to make. And the thing of it is, the price could have been far cheaper were not our band of capitalism still stunted by cronyism, protectionism and over regulation.
All of the people involved in bringing the supper to my table tonight did so out of their own enlightened self interest. And I bought all of the things that went into my supper not out of any feeling of benevolence towards the sellers, but out of my own self interest and with trust in the quality of goods from each supplier / producer.
Aren't global trade and capitalism wonderful things? As Ayn Rand once wrote:
Capitalism has been called a system of greed — yet it is the system that raised the standard of living of its poorest citizens to heights no collectivist system has ever begun to equal, and no tribal gang can conceive of.
So tonight, as I enjoy a simple, cheap and fine supper, I wonder what the masses are having in the socialist bastion of Venezuela? Or for that matter, what the deeply misguided and hypocritical Occupy protest veterans are dining on?
For anyone who needs a refresher in capitalism, there is no finer reference than Thomas Sowell's Basic Economics. If you haven't read it, do yourself a favor and purchase a copy.
The left is still railing about the right "lying" about Obama's remarks in Roanoke:
The left argues that Obama was not talking about businesses in the quote above, but about roads and bridges. It doesn't matter. Even straining credulity to concede the point for the rest of this post, it shows that Obama fundamentally misunderstands the economy.
In Obama's mind, the government is the key to prosperity, and American's owe it obeisance. Under either interpretation, it is crystal clear that Obama sees government as that which allows the growth of private enterprise and wealth. That is precisely backwards.
Every penny of wealth in our nation comes from private enterprise. The government creates, of itself, nothing - it is a parasite, albeit a necessary one, on the private sector. The dollar is worth more than the paper it is printed on solely because of the goods and services produced by the private sector, period. Moreover, before government can build a road or push out a defense contract, it must first collect tax - and those taxes are wholly taken from wealth that first arises in the private sector.
This is not a 'what came first' question, 'the chicken or the egg?' For example, go to England and you will find countless very narrow roads. None of them were originally "built" by government. They were, for millennia, roads cut by individuals on horse and cart taking goods and services to and from market. As this developed, the famed medieval markets were co-opted by the king - so that he could tax the private enterprise that went on there.
Government is wholly dependent on the private economy for tax dollar one. It is not, as Obama and the left seem to think, a goose that will always lay golden eggs solely for the benefit of government. It turns reality on its head. The key to government revenues is through growing private sector wealth, not raiding it and demanding yet more. For Obama to make the remarks he did in the video above show beyond doubt that he doesn't grasp this most fundamental of concepts, irrespective of what he meant.
And if there is any doubt about his inability to grasp basic economic concepts, later Obama made the following comment in an interview in July, claiming that Romney's business experience has nothing to do with job creation, adding that “[a]s the head of a private equity firm his job was to maximize profits and help wealthy investors."
How does Obama think jobs are created - by government without the private sector footing the bill? Does he think a single job in the private sector is not tied to the creation or protection of wealth? This is not the Soviet economy, where the old joke was, "I pretend to work, the government pretends to pay me." That economy failed for precisely that reason. Jobs don't come first, the creation of wealth does. No one in the private sector creates a job simply for the sake of doing so. Make work jobs are solely the province of governement.
At any rate, the left is daily screaming the mantra that the right is "LYING" about Obama's remarks in Norfolk. It doesn't matter, as any way you slice it, Obama is an economic special needs child who needs to be removed far from the reins of government if we are to have any chance to recover.
Capital gains are treated differently than normal income because it is the pool of capital that allows the economy to grow. That's why, every time we have dropped the Capital Gains tax over the past half century, it has resulted in increased tax revenues overall. And that's why Sweden, the most "progressive" of the European socialist countries, recently took the "radical" step of dropping their capital gains tax to zero. There are a host of arguments to be made for treating capital gains differently than ordinary income, and Charles Krauthammer makes a lot of them in the video below.
As Mark Levin asked on his show the other day, does Romney have a clue about capitalism? I would add, does he have a clue about the failure of the welfare state, the plight of those caught in generational poverty, or for that matter, the role of Democrats in insuring that nothing is done about it?
My gravest concern about Romney's electability is that the left is going to be able to successfully portray him as a combination Dr. Evil / Gordon Gecko / Robber barron in what is going to be a take no prisoners bout of class warfare. And if they do, Obama may well win. After all, if nothing else, Romney's campaign has taught us how saturation negative ads can indeed work to destroy one's opponent, irrespective of fairness or accuracy.
What Romney said in the quote above is beyond tin ear. It not only plays right into the left's class warfare meme, it just shows almost a complete failure to grasp the plight of America. The left will make a huge deal out of this. The right should also, as we are getting very close to making this man our nominee for President.
What a conservative candidate should have said:
President Obama's economy has driven millions of people into poverty and threatens to drive many more there unless we turn things around. History tells us with 100% certainty that the way to do that is through capitalism and wealth creation.
And yet, President Obama answer to all of this is to punish wealth creation out of "fairness." That language is also found in the history books. It is the language of class warfare, of socialism, and of economic ruin. Obama's appeal to "fairness" falsely appeals to our sense of justice. Inevitably, it will cripple our nation and make life that much harder for our declining middle class.
President Obama thinks he can tax and regulate us to prosperity. He thinks that he can do better than capitalism by pouring billions into creating new markets out of whole cloth with huge government mandates. President Obama's idea of capitalism is crony capitalism, where he, not the marketplace, picks the winners and losers. It is great if you are a crony of the President - but it hurts every other person in this country. No nation on earth has ever succeeded with the economic policies this President embraces.
But even beyond that, the welfare and entitlement society are driving our nation into bankruptcy. As to the welfare state, it has utterly failed the many poor in our society who are caught in generational cycles of poverty. It is a tragedy and a travesty that fifty years on from the start of the welfare state, 25% of the black population is still living below the poverty line. But we know how to stop that cycle. Education is the key. To paraphrase Juan Williams, the most important thing we can do for the perennial poor is to allow their children to receive precisely the same level of quality education that President Obama's children receive.
Sasha and Malia are receiving the very finest education available in a private school in Washinton D.C. Yet one of the first acts of President Obama was to end a program that gave the poor children of Washington, D.C. the opportunity to get that same education as his children. Instead, President Obama consigned the DC's poor to the worst public educational system in America. He did that because the Teacher's Unions - the economic foundation of the Democrat Party and the single biggest impediment to improving education in America - complained.
Unfortunately, if you vote for President Obama, if you are poor or, for that matter, for many in the middle class, your children will never get that opportunity that Sasha and Malia Obama have. There is no excuse for any child born of this country to be forced into a substandard education. Unfortunately, that cycle will never end under President Obama and the Democrats, because they value the dollars they get from the Teachers' unions more than they care about the generational poor in this country.
We really are at an absolutely critical point in our nation's history. Progressivism has built up in our machinery of state to levels that have worked fundamental change to our nation and that threaten to drag us down into bankruptcy and societal failure. Wholesale fundamental changes need to occur to clean out the machinery before it becomes irrevocably broken. Our educational system desperately needs to be overhauled. The out of control regulatory bureaucracies need to be systemically altered to restore democratic control. The EPA should never be able to regulate carbon without an affirmative vote of Congress. HHS should never be able to force Christians to fund acts that directly violate their religion's core beleifs without an affirmative vote of Congress. The FCC should never be able to unilaterally exercise control over the internet without an affirmative vote of Congress. The methods by which the left funnels hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to left wing organizations needs to end. Unions need to be brought to heel. No person in America should be forced to pay dues to a union simply so that they can get a job in a particular industry. The greens' keys to the courthouse, where decisions are made that should only be made by Congress, needs to end. The left's war on our military needs to end before we become so weakened that other nation's are willing to become adventurous. And then there are the entitlement programs that have us on the knife's edge of ruin.
I look at all of the above and ask myself, will Romney make any of those changes? Does he have a vision for America that addresses any of these fundamental issues? I don't think so. At best, I think that he will tinker around the margins for most of them. Villagers With Torches has a very good post up answering the question similarly. But each primary voter really needs to look at it and answer that question for themselves. Romney would be better for America than Obama, true, but is he, at this critical moment, the best choice that Republicans can make?
There are numerous fascinating posts out over the past few days that I have wanted to blog but have just run out of time. Here they are:
PJM: Michael Ledeen provides a reminder - totalitarianism must win out or be defeated. There is no middle ground. He puts it in terms of Iran, but I think it equally as applicable to the insane idea of negotiating with the Taliban.
That’s no doubt the “deep down” reason why Obama worked so hard — indeed is still secretly working hard — to get his version of the Hitler/Stalin pact with Iran. Somebody ought to remind Obama how that great triumph of totalitarian diplomacy worked out for the two of them.
Big Lizards has some additional cogent thoughts on the Obama decision to negotiate with the Taliban.
NRO: Real capitalism exists only in Communist China - - - well, the special district of Hong Kong, where limited government, a laughably simple tax code, and no major regulatory regime to speak of stand in direct contrast to the U.S. How would we like to see Hong Kong's near 6% growth this year.
The Daily Gator: A rogues gallery of the Top Ten Lunatic Fringe Ron Paul Supporters. Paul almost makes Obama's choice of associations look benign.
PJM: Spengler puts "private equity and creative destruction" into context, taking Gingrich and Perry rightfully to task. Theirs is an attack from the left on capitalism - and I say that as one who would much prefer to see Gingrich in the White House than Romney:
Want to see what America would look like without private equity? Move to Detroit and contemplate the ruins of a city ruined by the placid conformity of auto industry executives. The economic impact of the corporate takeover business can’t be measured by the outcome of takeovers as such. Private equity transformed the way American business thought about the world.
Across The Fence: Mark Meckler, of Tea Party fame, discusses his arrest in NYC for possession of a firearm (unloaded, in a case in his luggage, for which he had a valid permit) after he tried to declare it before boarding a plane at LaGuardia airport. NYC ultimately dropped the charges, but is refusing now to return his gun. It is all a Constitutional travesty.
PJM: Kevin Martin discusses the dissatisfaction of progressive blacks with Obama
Belafonte and others would be hard pressed to find anyone in the black community who could claim they are better off today than they were 3 years ago.
That goes hand in glove with my post the other day, that now is the time for conservatives to make a real push for the black vote. If we can convince 1 in 10 of the reality - that "on the two most important issues facing blacks today, jobs and education, their best hopes lay with the right," then the Democrats will be put in dire straits.
NRO: Five Muslims have been arrested in the UK and charged with violating a new hate speech law for stating in a leaflet that gays will go to hell and should receive the death penalty.
The passage of the law, and its first use this week, is the continuation of a worrying trend in the United Kingdom. Laws governing thought and speech, rather than deed, are becoming commonplace. . . . Worse, it cripples free expression and leaves people looking over their shoulders.
The UK, from which the concept of freedom of speech springs, has taken a worrying turn against it since the 1980's - to the extent that I find myself today, for the first time, coming down on the side of the radical Muzzies.
Ironic Surrealism: Obnoxious, hypocritical, outrageous . . . . are just a few of the adjectives one could quite legitimately apply to the DNC Chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, who has once again tried to blame the Tea Party for the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. What a detestable woman.
Got Medieval: If you like the legend of King Arthur, GM provides some of the fascinating backstory of the legend's author, Geoffrey of Monmouth.
Woman Honor Thyself: Gender confusion [shiver] is being foisted on us by "lefties and Hollywood bozos:"
The underlying and not so subtle aim is to blur and haze the line between men and womens’wear, thus blurring the line between men and women period.
Free market capitalism is defined by open competition. Competition increases quality and lowers cost. The polar opposite is crony capitalism, where the government picks winners and losers, competition is stifled if not banned, and monopolies are created. The public suffers significantly from the absence of competition.
No better example of how this works can be seen than with production of the drug Makena, a progesterone mix that has, for the past decade, successfully treated pregnant women at significant risk of spontaneous premature labor. It is a condition that effects black women at far higher rates than either whites or hispanics. The drug is given to such women once a week between the 16th and 36th week of their pregnancy. For years, the drug has been mixed at numerous pharmacies and has been sold at $10 to $20 per shot, with an entire regimen of the drug costing between $200 and $400. It is estimated that the drug could benefit up to 130,000 women in the U.S. annually. It is also the only known effective treatment for women suffering from high risk of spontaneous premature labor.
The FDA recently gave sole approval for production of Makena to KV Pharmaceutical of St.Louis. KV did not pioneer the use or production of the drug. And indeed, the drug was first developed over 50 years ago. Patent rights, which were never KV's to begin with, ended decades ago. Nonetheless, KV petitioned the FDA to give them approval to produce the drug under the "orphan drug" law, which would give KV, among other things, a seven year monopoly on the market to produce Makena. The FDA complied.
The costs for this will be born by the public through Medicaid and higher insurance premiums. The only winner in this gross distortion of the market is KV pharmaceutical and those who championed their cause - such as the March of Dimes who receives hundreds of thousands in support from KV annually.
This is an outrageous travesty that cries out for congressional investigation. Why did the FDA approve the monopoly under these facts? Is it as it appears, that the orphan drug law was wholly misused in this case? And if the government is going to grant a monopoly over lifesaving drugs, what responsibility does or should it have to oversee pricing? The bottom line, in a just society, we would hang the people at KV and FDA for this grand larceny taking place at the expense of women in need and the public purse.
If we're fighting to reform the tax code and increase exports, the benefits cannot just translate into greater profits and bonuses for those at the top. They have to be shared by American workers, who need to know that opening markets will lift their standard of living as well as your bottom line," President Obama told the Chamber of Commerce on Monday morning.
Its Obama channeling his inner Marx.
Obama wants to rule by fiat what markets ultimately determine. The laws of supply and demand apply to jobs and wages also. If our economy is booming and employers have to compete for employees, what then happens to employee wages and benefits? Indeed, that history is the history of our nation. Free market capitalism has been the single greatest boon to mankind in history. Ask Milton Friedman.
On a related note, as Friedman also points out, government regulation creates monopolies, it does not create competition.
Obama will never be mistaken for a free market capitalist. To the contrary, his push of our nation into crony capitalism, picking winners and losers in the marketplace, can only hurt the "have nots" he claims to be championing.
Update: Given that small businesses create the most jobs in America and provide perhaps the most direct avenue to increasing wealth, it would seem that one of the focuses of Obama should be on removing barriers to small business creation. Instead, we are seeing a growth at the state level of big businesses partnering with government to limit competition. This from Hot Air:
Amid calls for shrinking government, lawmakers across the country are vowing to cut regulations that crimp economic growth. President Barack Obama recently said it's time to root out laws that "are just plain dumb."
Tell that to the cat groomers, tattoo artists, tree trimmers and about a dozen other specialists across the country who are clamoring for more rules governing small businesses.
They're asking to become state-licensed professionals, which would mean anyone wanting to be, say, a music therapist or a locksmith, would have to pay fees, apply for a license and in some cases, take classes and pass exams. The hope is that regulation will boost the prestige of their professions, provide oversight and protect consumers from shoddy work.
But economists—and workers shut out of fields by educational requirements or difficult exams—say licensing mostly serves as a form of protectionism, allowing veterans of the trade to box out competitors who might undercut them on price or offer new services.
"Occupations prefer to be licensed because they can restrict competition and obtain higher wages," said Morris Kleiner, a labor professor at the University of Minnesota. . . .
While some states have long required licensing for workers who handle food or touch others—caterers and hair stylists, for example—economists say such regulation is spreading to more states for more industries. The most recent study, from 2008, found 23% of U.S. workers were required to obtain state licenses, up from just 5% in 1950, according to data from Mr. Kleiner. In the mid-1980s, about 800 professions were licensed in at least one state. Today, at least 1,100 are, according to the Council on Licensure, Enforcement and Regulation, a trade group for regulatory bodies. Among the professions licensed by one or more states: florists, interior designers, private detectives, hearing-aid fitters, conveyor-belt operators and retailers of frozen desserts.
At a time of widespread anxiety about the growth of government, the licensing push is meeting pockets of resistance, including a move by some legislators to require a more rigorous cost-benefit analysis before any new licensing laws are approved. Critics say such regulation spawns huge bureaucracies including rosters of inspectors. They also say licensing requirements—which often include pricey educations—can prohibit low-income workers from breaking in to entry-level trades.
Texas, for instance, requires hair-salon "shampoo specialists" to take 150 hours of classes, 100 of them on the "theory and practice" of shampooing, before they can sit for a licensing exam. That consists of a written test and a 45-minute demonstration of skills such as draping the client with a clean cape and evenly distributing conditioner. Glass installers, or glaziers, in Connecticut—the only state that requires such workers to be licensed—take two exams, at $52 apiece, pay $300 in initial fees and $150 annually thereafter.
California requires barbers to study full-time for nearly a year, a curriculum that costs $12,000 at Arthur Borner's Barber College in Los Angeles. Mr. Borner says his graduates earn more than enough to recoup their tuition, though he questions the need for such a lengthy program. "Barbering is not rocket science," he said. "I don't think it takes 1,500 hours to learn. But that's what the state says." . . .
Mr. Kleiner, of the University of Minnesota, looked at census data covering several occupations that are regulated in some states but not others, including librarians, nutritionists and respiratory therapists. He found that employment growth in those professions was about 20% greater, on average, in the unregulated states between 1990 and 2000.
Licensing can also drive up costs to consumers. Licensed workers earn, on average, 15% more than their unlicensed counterparts in other states—a premium that may be reflected in their prices, according to a study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research and conducted by Mr. Kleiner and Alan Krueger, an economist at Princeton University.
Mr. Kleiner estimates that across the U.S. economy, occupational licensing adds at least $116 billion a year to the cost of services, which amounts to about 0.1% of total consumer spending. In a look at dentistry, Mr. Kleiner found that the average price of dental services rose 11% when a state made it more difficult to get a dental license.
State regulators say licensing is vital to protect the health and safety of citizens, and industry experts generally agree that certain professions should be monitored. Inept or untrained electricians or tree-trimmers, for example, could put innocent bystanders in danger. Acupuncturists, tattoo artists and massage therapists can potentially inflict more direct harm.
However, in many service trades, licensure "is totally out of control," says Charles Wheelan, a lecturer in public policy at the University of Chicago. He says the marketplace might be a better judge than the government of whether a barber or a yoga instructor is competent. "It's fairly easy for you to tell whether you've gotten a bad haircut or not, and if quality turns out to be bad, it's not a big social problem," says Mr. Wheelan. . . .
◦ 67% of self-described Progressives believe that restrictions on housing development (i.e., regulations that reduce the supply of housing) do not make housing less affordable.
◦ 51% believe that mandatory licensing of professionals (i.e., reducing the supply of professionals) doesn’t increase the cost of professional services.
◦ Perhaps most amazing, 79% of self-described Progressive believe that rent control (i.e., price controls) does not lead to housing shortages.
Note that the questions here are not whether the benefits of these policies might outweigh the costs, but the basic economic effects of these policies. Those identifying as “libertarian” and “very conservative” were the most knowledgeable about basic economics. Those identifying as “Progressive” and “Liberal” were the worst.
I wrote in a post below about a recent poll showing that a significant percentage of young Americans are coming out of our schools imbued with a positive view of socialism and a negative view of capitalism. The above study described by the Volokh Conspiracy certainly goes a long way to further explaining those results. Only a lack of a fundamental grasp of basic economic reality can possibly explain the economic fantasies and arrogance of the socialist left. And as I wrote in What In The World Are They Teaching Our Children:
I have long thought that no child should graduate from high school without an understanding of free market economics, basic accounting and business law. It would seem we are a long way indeed from that reality.
I think that we fail to teach those topics at fundamental, long term risk to our nation.
Capitalism has been the world's greatest engine of wealth creation. The past three centuries of economic - and concomitant social - advancements throughout the world are a history of the impact of capitalism - and, in the mirror image, the failure of socialism. Yet today, many of our children are apparently coming out of school with a negative view of capitalism, a dearth of knowledge about economics, and no understanding of the negative impacts of socialism. Moreover, it would appear that the left's rebranding from "liberal" to "progressive" has been a successful one. Chalk that one up to the "you can fool most of the people some of the time." See this recently released - and highly depressing - poll from Pew:
“Socialism” is a negative for most Americans, but certainly not all Americans. “Capitalism” is regarded positively by a majority of the public, though it is a thin majority. There are certain segments of the public – notably, young people and Democrats – where both “isms” are rated about equally. . . .
These are among the findings of a national survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press that tests reactions to words and phrases frequently used in current political discourse. Overall, 29% say they have a positive reaction to the word “socialism,” while 59% react negatively. The public’s impressions of “capitalism,” though far more positive, are somewhat mixed. Slightly more than half (52%) react positively to the word “capitalism,” compared with 37% who say they have a negative reaction.
A large majority of Republicans (77%) react negatively to “socialism,” while 62% have a positive reaction to “capitalism.” Democrats’ impressions are more divided: In fact, about as many Democrats react positively to “socialism” (44%) as to “capitalism” (47%).
Reaction to “capitalism” is lukewarm among many demographic groups. Fewer than half of young people, women, people with lower incomes and those with less education react positively to “capitalism.”
The survey, conducted April 21-26 among 1,546 adults, measured reactions to nine political words and phrases. The most positive reactions are to “family values” (89% positive) and “civil rights” (87%). About three-quarters see “states’ rights” (77%) and “civil liberties” (76%) positively, while 68% have a positive reaction to the word “progressive.” . . .
The most striking partisan differences come in reactions to the word “socialism.” Just 15% of Republicans react positively to “socialism” while 77% react negatively. By more than two-to-one (64% to 26%), independents also have a negative impression of “socialism.” However, Democrats are evenly divided – 44% have a positive reaction to “socialism” while 43% react negatively.
“Capitalism” elicits a less partisan reaction. About six-in-ten Republicans (62%) react positively to “capitalism,” compared with 29% who have a negative reaction. About half of independents (52%) have a positive impression while 39% react negatively. Among Democrats, 47% react positively to “capitalism” while nearly as many (43%) react negatively.
There is a substantial partisan divide in views of the word “progressive.” However, majorities of Democrats (81%), independents (64%) and Republicans (56%) have a positive reaction to “progressive.” . . .
Young people are more positive about “socialism” – and more negative about “capitalism” – than are older Americans. Among those younger than 30, identical percentages react positively to “socialism” and “capitalism” (43% each), while about half react negatively to each. Among older age groups, majorities view “socialism” negatively and “capitalism” positively. . . .
More than twice as many blacks as whites react positively to “socialism” (53% vs. 24%). Yet there are no racial differences in views of “capitalism” – 50% of African Americans and 53% of whites have a positive reaction.
Those with a high school education or less are evenly divided over “capitalism” (44% positive vs. 42% negative). Among those with some college experience, 49% react positively to “capitalism” as do 68% of college graduates. Those with a high school education or less are more likely to express a positive view of “socialism” than do those with more education. . . .
Perhaps surprisingly, opinions about the terms “socialism” and “capitalism” are not correlated with each other. Most of those who have a positive reaction to “socialism” also have a positive reaction to “capitalism”; in fact, views of “capitalism” are about the same among those who react positively to “socialism” as they are among those who react negatively (52% and 56%, respectively, view “capitalism” positively). Conversely, views of “socialism” are just as negative among those who have a positive reaction to “capitalism” (64% negative) as those who react negatively (61% negative). . . .
I have long thought that no child should graduate from high school without an understanding of free market economics, basic accounting and business law. It would seem we are a long way indeed from that reality.
Among the many fictions Obama sold us was that Democrats were not repsponsible for our economic meldown (Fannie, Freddie, moral hazard, race based lending standards - nothing to see there) - but rather that our finacial sector was. Obama tried to use the financial crisis to push his priorities of health care and cap and trade while tossing the infamous Stimulus into the economy in the hopes that a bill - only 2.6% of which was aimed at small business - would somehow stop the unemployment hemmoraging.
Now here we sit, well into a recession that is second only to the Great Depression in the depth of its effects and length. So what does Obama plan for an Act II that will put our economy on better footing? How about new bank regulations to limit their size and trading abilities as well as taxing our most productive banks in what amounts to a public scourging. Perhaps even more horrifying is the plan for Washington's most toxic asset, one of the primary architects of our finanical disaster, Barney Frank, to do away with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and replace them with a new agency created by him. What could possibly go wrong.
Obama has floated a plan to encumber banks with a host of new regulations to limit the size of banks and the type of transactions in which they can engage. This is nothing more than an Axlerod inspired attempt to fan the flames of class anger to raise poll numbers. It does nothing to solve the problems that got it us into this financial catastrophe and it will likely put a stake in our global financial competitiveness, but it does play to the socialist meme of capitalism as the root of all evil. Thus it works for Obama, but Treasury Sec., Tim Geitner is finding it a bit difficult to get behind:
President Barack Obama's newest Wall Street crackdown was met with hesitation from Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, who voiced concern that politics could sacrifice good economic policy, according to financial industry sources.
Geithner is concerned that the proposed limits on big banks' trading and size could impact U.S. firms' global competitiveness, the sources said, speaking anonymously because Geithner has not spoken publicly about his reservations.
He also has concerns that the limits do not necessarily get at the root of the problems and excesses that fueled the recent financial meltdown, the sources said.
A White House official said both Geithner and Lawrence Summers, the director of Obama's National Economic Council, worked closely with Paul Volcker, who heads a White House economic recovery board, in developing the proposals.
"The plan was submitted to the president with a unanimous recommendation from the economic team," the official said.
Obama's proposals would prevent banks or financial institutions that own banks from investing in, owning or sponsoring a hedge fund or private equity fund.
Obama called for a new cap on the size of banks in relation to the overall financial sector that would take into account not only bank deposits, which are already capped, but also liabilities and other non-deposit funding sources.. . .
They come as the administration has sharpened its rhetoric against Wall Street where the announcement was met with disdain. Bank shares slid and the dollar fell against other currencies. . . .
Lawrence White, a professor at New York University's Stern School of Business and a former regulator, said Obama's proposals were "a solution to the wrong problem."
"They have this rhetoric that it was proprietary trading that was the problem," White said. "That's wrong."
Mr. White's problem is that he does not understand that, for Obama, all problems, from national security to economic, are political - and in his world, it it is the ideology of the far left that are driving Obama's politics. Capitalism is evil. It must be controlled by government and there is nothing wrong with using it as a whipping boy to gather votes. The real problems that led to our fiscal meltdown in fact have to be ignored because they implicate nearly every Democrat in Congress today, including our resident Acorn enabler, Obama himself.
In the same vein is Obama's new punitive bank tax, designed to garner votes by punishing select banks. Warren Buffet, an Obama supporter during the campaign, finds himself not exactly impressed by this latest attack:
Warren Buffett opposes President Barack Obama’s proposed levy on financial institutions because firms including Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Wells Fargo & Co. already repaid bailout funds.
“I don’t see any reason why they should be paying a special tax,” said Buffett, the chairman and chief executive officer of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., in an interview on Bloomberg Television today. Supporters of the plan to tax the banks “are trying to punish people,” he said. “I don’t see the rationale for it.”
Obama announced a plan last week to impose a fee on as many as 50 financial companies to recover losses from the federal government’s Troubled Asset Relief Program. The levy would apply to firms with more than $50 billion in assets, including Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs, two companies that Berkshire has investments in. It would exclude Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored mortgage lenders taken over by the U.S.
“Look at the damage Fannie and Freddie caused, and they were run by the Congress,” said Buffett. “Should they have a special tax on congressmen because they let this thing happen to Freddie and Fannie? I don’t think so.”
Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs and other beneficiaries of the bailout such as Bank of America Corp. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. repaid the money they got from the government. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac owe about $110 billion, according to Bloomberg data.
“Most of the banks didn’t need to be saved,” Buffett said. “Including Wells Fargo.” . . .
The president’s proposed tax would be imposed on firms including bank holding companies and some insurers. The administration estimates the tax will raise $90 billion over 10 years and $117 billion over 12 years.
“My determination to achieve this goal is only heightened when I see reports of massive profits and obscene bonuses at some of the very firms who owe their continued existence to the American people,” Obama said Jan. 14 when he announced the Financial Crisis Responsibility Fee. “We want our money back, and we’re going to get it.”
Let's be clear, when you tax a corporation, it always, always, gets passed through to the clientele. It will not create one new job to lessen the record unemployment in America. It will merely make our banks a little less competitive so Obama can pose as a populist champion.
And last but not least in doubling down on failure is perhaps the scariest finanical news yet to come out of Washington in decades. It is a plan for Barney Frank, one of three central architects of our financial meltdown, to write the next chapter of America's march to the finanical precipice. This from the WSJ:
A top House Democrat on Friday said his committee was preparing to recommend "abolishing" mortgage-finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and rebuilding the U.S. housing-finance system from scratch.
"The remedy here is...as I believe this committee will be recommending, abolishing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in their current form and coming up with a whole new system of housing finance," said Rep. Barney Frank (D., Mass.), the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee.
. . . Fannie and Freddie own or guarantee around half of the nation's $11 trillion in home mortgages. . . .
From Richard Avrech at Seraphic Secret, an insightful essay on utopianism versus reality and Big Government statism versus capitalism that appears as part of a post on the Health Care bill. He captures in a few paragraphs what I struggle in far more to say:
Seraphic Secret believes in the power of the individual, the power of free markets to effect positive results for a majority of the people.
There is no such thing as a solution for everybody.
That is called utopia and utopian models always end in tyranny if not outright genocide.
Seraphic Secret strongly believes in religious charities such as The Jewish Health Care Foundation of Los Angeles.
Charities flourish when government is least intrusive. But when government assumes control of private initiative charity declines because high taxes drain wallets and people assume that, y'know, the government is taking care of everything.
Remember when computers and other innovative electronics cost the earth? Private industry and competition drove prices down and quality up. The same free market model should and could be used for health care reform.
But Obama and the Democrats have no faith in free markets, no faith in a free American citizenry.
Obama and the Democrats believe in big government, they believe in, well, themselves—a ruling elite.
But big government does not innovate.
Big government does not create new jobs or new markets.
Big government is a cumbersome beast that is concerned, primarily, with maintaining and expanding its own power.
And Big government is the enemy of freedom and decency. Because when you relinquish control of your life to government, you relinquish free choice, you give up on the American dream.
And that is the plague called socialism/communism/collectivism, recast by modern liberals as, ahem, social justice.
You—yes you—are about to sink into a world of new taxes and a grim swamp of government health care.
G-d help us.
Do read Robert's entire post. Robert's essay is a good compliment to one of my favorite Thomas Sowell essays: The Prejudices Of The Elite. If you don't already read Seraphic Secret on a daily basis, I would highly recommend you start doing so.
IF there is any doubt that greens are true watermelons - green on the outside, red on the inside, listen to Hugo Chavez condemn capitalism to great applause at the IPCC meeting in Copenhagen.
While outside, it was a reverse watermelon, with the red being worn on the outside.
Meanwhile, if you want proof of the existence of God, just look to Copenhagen. As the IPCC conference goes into its final day while Gore et al try to convince us that global warming is real and a hot catastrophe is just around the corner, a blizzard is going on outside:
World leaders flying into Copenhagen today to discuss a solution to global warming will first face freezing weather as a blizzard dumped 10 centimeters (4 inches) of snow on the Danish capital overnight.
“Temperatures will stay low at least the next three days,” Henning Gisseloe, an official at Denmark’s Meteorological Institute, said today by telephone, forecasting more snow in coming days. “There’s a good chance of a white Christmas.” . . .
Denmark has a maritime climate and milder winters than its Scandinavian neighbors. It hasn’t had a white Christmas for 14 years . . . and only had seven last century. Temperatures today fell as low as . . . 25 Fahrenheit.
Ace of Spades ponders whether God may be trying to give all of us - and in particular the Goracle - a message? Could it be that bit about "Thou shall have no other God . . ."
At any rate, this led Ace to do a riff on the arguments for and against the existence of God from the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy:
The pratical upshot of all this is that is that wherever Albert Arnold Gore, Junior, chief evangelist for the Cult of the Virgin Gaia, goes, spreading his Gospel of a rapidly-warming earth, the weather suddenly takes an intense turn to the frigid and starts dumping snow on every SUV and private jet in his carbon-throbbing vehicular entourage.
Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindboggingly ironic could happen, and continue happening, and happen and happen and happen and then happen again some more, purely by chance, and without some Divine Hand manipulating the cosmic weather machine, that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God. . .
The only thing standing in the way of a binding deal to soak the West and regulate carbon world-wide, all in the name of world socialism anthropogenic global warming (AGW), is, in what has to be the world's greatest irony in all of recorded history, communist China. The fact that the Chinese realize world socialism isin't such a great idea - since they practiced it in their own country until the death of Mao - ought to tell us all something. Amazing, isin't it, that the last stalwart defender of capitalism - and perhaps the savior of it if they remain firm - will be a communist country.
Interestingly enough, it was recently leaked that the UN IPCC's call for carbon reduction targets are insufficient to ward off their own most likely scenarios for catastrophe. If that is the case, then the primary motivaters at the Copenhagen conference must be something other than saving Gaia at all costs.
There are certainly many vested interests driving Copenhagen - and their motivations all boild down to power and money. As to the latter, the rent-seekers stand to profit immensely from carbon regulation and the global carbon trading scheme. That scheme is threatened if a new deal is not put in place tomorrow. At least one outlet is saying that the grand bargain today will be a deal to keep Kyoto in place amongst the signatories and add a non-binding agreement for non-signatories, such as the U.S. As EU Referendum points out, such a deal will keep the carbon trading scheme alive:
[T]he deal is that the Kyoto Protocol is saved – which is what all the fuss was really about. That safeguards the carbon market and opens the way for it to expand to the $2-trillion level by the year 2020. Against that, even €100 billion is chump-change - you can buy countries with that sort of money.
Their deal in place, the kleptocrats and the Corporatocracy can go away happy and plan how to spend all their ill-gotten gains, leaving the leaders to grandstand, make their deals, shake hands and strut through their photo-sessions before jetting off in olumes of "carbon" to be greeted as saviours by their underwhelmed peoples.
As for saving the planet, well no-one really believes that greenie shit anyway ... except the greenies, and they don't matter. There is plenty of pepper spray left and no shortage of temporary detention space. Now that the money men have got what they came for, all the rest is theatre.
If one wanted to truly regulate carbon, then there would be a simple carbon tax, perhaps varied by industry and based on the ease with which the particular industry could regulate carbon output. Instead, there is the carbon trading scheme that is, one a massive distortion of free markets, and two, an invitation to fraud, corruption, and gamesmanship.
According to a recent PJM article, the Europeant carbon trading scheme (ETS) that went into effect five years ago has driven up energy prices in Europe by as much as 20% for the rank and file. It has proven a cesspool of fraud, with organized crime exploiting the interplay between carbon credits and the EU VAT tax system. And indeed, "Europol says that in some EU countries, up to 90 percent of the entire market volume is fraudulent." But probably the worst aspect of the ETS is how it has distorted the marketplace. This from PJM:
. . . For example, European steelmakers have threatened to leave the EU for India, eliminating the jobs of up to 90,000 European workers in the process, unless the EU grants the steelmakers free carbon credits worth hundreds of millions of euros. As a result, ArcelorMittal, the world’s largest steel company, has gained windfall profits in the form of carbon credits worth nearly €1 billion, for which it paid nothing. By 2012, ArcelorMittal will have accumulated surplus permits for 80 million tons of carbon dioxide, which is equivalent to the pollution generated annually by all of Denmark.
ArcelorMittal is now free to sell its surplus carbon credits on the market or to hoard them for future use. If it hangs on to them, the company will be able to avoid cutting greenhouse gas emissions possibly for decades, effectively undermining the ETS. According to Sandbag, a British NGO that campaigns to improve carbon trading, the EU’s ETS has been turned into “a system for generating free subsidies.”
Even Rajendra K Pachauri, who has been the chairman of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) since 2002, has been suspected of having a role in gaming the EU system to profit from the trade in carbon credits. The Mumbai-based Tata Group, an Indian multinational conglomerate which has business ties to Pachauri (who accepted the Nobel Peace Price on behalf of the IPCC (which it shared with Al Gore in 2007) for its work on global warming), may stand to make several hundred million euros in EU carbon credits simply by closing a steel production facility in Britain. . . .
The WSJ expounds on the plant closing discussed in the above paragraph. That closing saw 1700 British workers loose their job and saw the plant moved to India - meaning that there was no reduction in carbon released into the atmosphere. Tata made a windfall. It would be hard to find any better example with which to indict the entire carbon trading morass. As the WSJ concludes:
To summarize: Cap and trade is a scheme that would impose heavy carbon taxes and allowances on U.S. industries, which would then have an incentive to move overseas themselves, or to sell those allowances to overseas companies that could use them to become more competitive against U.S. companies. Like the 1,700 Brits at Redcar, American workers would be the big losers.
If that is not market distortion on steroids, nothing is. And the people paying for it, in higher energy bills and lost jobs, are the rank and file.
The rent seekers won't be the only one's walking away from Copenhagen with their gravy train intact. The third world kleptocrats have a friend in the Obama administration, which, through Sec. of State Hillary Clinton, announced that the U.S. will take part in sending $100 billion a year to either the World Bank or the UN to distribute as they see fit to further the third world's fight against AGW. My ability to state all of the above without a single vulgarity has reduced to zero my reserve of self discipline. I will go Galt before I see a penny of my taxes to this socialist insanity.
Charlie Martin, writing at PJM, notes that, as more data is made public - even beyond the bombshell Russian reveleations of the other day - the more we are finding inexplicable anecdotes wherein AGW scientists have made large upward adjustments to raw temperatures that could not possibly be justified. These include:
- The Keenan study comparing raw temperature data for Alaska to the "corrected, homogenized and cooked IPCC data the IPCC is using for Alaska
- Nashville, where Anthony Watts finds a slight 130 year cooling trend from the raw data that the IPCC has somehow turned into a warming trend.
- Antarctica, where the GHCN has removed inconvienient data points. Digging into it further, it became apparent that the GHCN based its homogonized and cooked warming ternd on a single station in Antarctica - Rothra Station - the one in a heat island that shows anamolous warming.
And as Joseph D'Aleo points out at PJM, it would appear that the adjusted data used by the CRA - that we now learn was cherry picked in Russia and, as we see in the examples above, tortured above - is virtually the exact same figures used by Hadley, NASA, amd GHCN. Further, he points out all the difficulties apparent in trying to determine "global" temperatures, not the least of which are major declines in the number of monitoring stations, incomplete data sets, and the use of the remaining stations to extrapolate temperatures of locations at great distance away - indeed, 1000 kilometers and more.
Bishop Hill looks at the revelations from Russia yesterday - that the IPCC and Hadley have cooked the Russian books to show AGW in that country where the data indicates none exists - from the standpoint of "gatekeeping. As he notes:
. . .at least some sceptics simply gave up trying to get their views published because they knew they could not get their findings past the gatekeepers. This demonstrates that the IPCC reports can never be anything other than biased. The scientific literature does not represent the collected knowledge mankind has about the climate. It represents the collected views of part of the climatological community.
And lastly, perhaps the most criminal aspect of AGW science has been how they have committed a fraud on the public while stonewalling, refusing to provide their raw data, meta-data, computer programs to allow others to verify their work. Thank God for Steve McIntyre, the brilliant Canadian who has persevered for over a decade to correct this situation and set the records straight. Bishop Hill has a post detailing Steve's efforts to verify the fraudulent Yamal tree ring study for nearly a decade while the author, Briffa, stonewalled. It makes fascinating reading.
It turns out Pope Benedict XVI has a bit of Karl Marx in him. The Pope has issued a 144 page encyclical letter (not ex cathedra), Caritas In Veritate (Charity in Truth), arguing for what amounts to a new socialist world order with business centrally controlled and run for the social good rather than profit.
It is more than a bit ironic, since the father of socialism, Karl Marx, provided the historical framework for the war on Christianity that the left is carrying on so successfully today. But in a way, it is not surprising that both should advocate socialism, as socialism is ultimately a Utopian ideal, As Churchill sagely noted some years ago, there are only two places where socialism would work - "in heaven, where it is not needed, and in hell, where it is already in practice."
"Ex Cathedra," by the way, refers to the relatively recent doctrine of papal infallibility. The doctrine holds that the Pope speaks with divine inspiration - and thus his pronouncements are infallible - when he speaks on moral issues and invokes the doctrine of infallibility by explicitly stating that his teaching is a core belief to be adopted by the entire Church.
This from the Washington Post on the Pope's encyclical letter:
Pope Benedict XVI criticized the international economic system yesterday and called for a new global structure based on social responsibility, concern for the dignity of the worker and a respect for ethics.
"Today's international economic scene, marked by grave deviations and failures, requires a profoundly new way of understanding human enterprise," Benedict wrote in his latest encyclical, which is the most authoritative document a pope can issue. "Without doubt, one of the greatest risks for business is that they are almost exclusively answerable to their investors, thereby limited in their social value."
In the sweeping 144-page document, Benedict sketches a radically different world economy, in which access to food and water is a universal right, wealthy nations share with poorer ones and profit is not the ultimate goal of commerce. He advocates the creation of a "world political authority" to manage the economy.
He blames "badly managed and largely speculative financial dealing" for causing the economic meltdown. The primary capital to be safeguarded is people, he says, adding that economic systems need to be guided by charity and truth. . . .
Unfortunately, the Pope has things backwards. He apparently skipped Econ 101 to concentrate on religious training. Capitalism has been the greatest engine of human advancement and the war on poverty that the world has ever known. The breakdown in the markets that we are experiencing can be traced in a direct line to government intervention for the purpose of social engineering - precisely what the Pope is advocating. If the Pope wants to ensure social progress, he is going about it in completely the wrong way. As Anatole Kaletsky wrote in the Times in 2003:
Even if there were room for argument about the benefits of free trade and free markets to workers in advanced industrial countries — and there really cannot be, if we compare what has happened to ordinary people’s lives in Western and Eastern Europe, not to mention in North and South Korea, during the 50 years since the Second World War — the principle that global capitalism is the most benign and successful of all human creations would be firmly established by the social progress in China since its integration into the global economy.
A few days ago, Charles Krauthammer noted that when our President finds himself on the side of Castro and Chavez, its time for him to reevaluate his position. A similar thing can be said of our Pope. When he finds himself advocating the policies of Marx and Lenin, that ought to be a clue that it is time to reevaluate his position. Business are and always will be soulless institutions. It is the individuals who profit from and are employed by the business - those with souls - upon whom the Pope should be concentrating. And history tells us that, as a general rule, their condition will be better and their charitable giving will grow the more the business profits.
Thirty years ago today, Margaret Thatcher, the daughter of a grocer, ascended to the position of Prime Minister. Britain was in economic disarray from Labour's post WWII socialist policies. PM Thatcher would be ushered out of office near a decade later by members of her own party, the Tories, over her refusal to countenance surrendering any more of Britain's sovereign powers to the EU. In between, she changed the fabric of her nation, leaving it far stronger than she found it.
For that, she is beloved by conservatives in Britain (a group not synonymous with the Tory Party). And for her capitalist policies and iron will to overcome all that the left could throw in her path, she is reviled by the socialists. Those feelings on both sides run as hot today as they did a quarter century ago. Her legacy in the short run has suffered from years of smearing at the BBC and a left who teach school children of the wisdom of Clement Attlee while giving short shrift to the likes of Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher.
You can see a range of opinions and retrospectives on the former Prime Minister in the UK papers today. I have collected some below:
This from the Times editorial board on Margaret Thatcher:
. . . Many of the arguments that dominated the political debate before Mrs Thatcher came to office now seem extraordinary. Did the Government really try to control inflation by setting the price of supermarket goods by committee? Did it really prevent citizens from spending currency abroad? Did it really try to settle national strikes by according union leaders semi-official status? That no mainstream politician would dream of advocating any of these things now is testament to her political success.
It is hard to recall that when Margaret Thatcher set her face against prices and incomes policy, union power and exchange controls it was she who was considered outlandish. It was regarded as inevitable that her policy of driving down inflation without an incomes policy would have to be reversed when unemployment became unmanageable. She would be forced to make a U-turn. And perhaps, had the Falklands conflict and the choice of Michael Foot as Labour leader not intervened, she would indeed have been forced to choose between a U-turn and political defeat. She would now be remembered as a political cautionary tale rather than as a political heroine.
Fortune, however, favoured the bold. Mrs Thatcher was able to see through her programme while enjoying fantastic political success. Even now the policies she pursued are hotly controversial. So is her extremely combative personality. But her answer to the critics is simple — what she did was necessary and overcoming resistance to it was hard. The social dislocation experienced by some was, however regrettable, hard to avoid. The pain felt during the medical procedure she undertook resulted from the extent of the injuries she was seeking to heal rather than from the callousness of the surgeon or the refusal to take an alternative course.
There are criticisms of Margaret Thatcher’s governments that stand more scrutiny than those that suggest a softer landing was possible for the British economy. It is unfortunate that she did not accompany her economic liberalism with more political and social liberalism. And the tone of her administration sometimes moved from being necessarily tough to being unnecessarily arrogant. There is also a criticism from the Right — that she did not do enough to reshape public services or reduce the size of the State.
Yet against these criticisms is another simple fact. It was not simply economically that the Thatcher governments achieved a transformation. Socially they challenged the elitism of closed institutions and the pessimism of the Establishment. Margaret Thatcher stood for modernisation, meritocracy and optimism about Britain’s future. . . .
And from London's colorful Mayor Boris Johnson, writing in the Telegraph, a very thoughtful essay on the life and legacy of PM Thatcher:
In the course of researching this article I approached an intelligent 15 year-old girl. She had been born three years after Margaret Thatcher left office. She had never seen her in action. She had no personal memories of any of the great controversies of the Thatcher epoch. And, therefore, she struck me as a perfect source for an understanding of the full semiotic range of the words "Margaret Thatcher" in the minds of young people today. This schoolgirl had been taught by good left-liberal teachers. She had read the papers and listened all her life to the BBC, and she had the normal British teenager's range of cultural references. I tried a word-association test. "So what do you think," I asked her, "when I say the words 'Margaret Thatcher' "? She paused, and then she said: "Billy Elliott." [For we across the pond, that was a movie which used PM Thatcher's breaking of the unions as its backdrop and portrayed PM Thatcher in an unflattering light]
And there, my friends, you have the cultural war that continues to this day – 30 years after she came to power – over the legacy of Britain's first female prime minister. Not since Napoleon has a nation been so divided over the merits of a former leader. For millions of young people who have watched Billy Elliott, Thatcher is the evil, boss-eyed termagant whose disastrous economic philosophy was responsible for the break-up of ancient Hovis-ad mining communities, and whose awful blurtings of right-wing dogma inspired all that was basest in human nature. She was a semi-ludicrous mixture of Boudicca and Queen Victoria, who whipped up her folk to ecstasies of cretinous Brussels-bashing. She was the creator the Yuppies and Essex Man, and the spiritual godmother of all the red-braced spivs and champagne-guzzling wide boys who have done so much damage with their greed and their recklessness – and it is a measure of her totemic status that people manage to blame her for the credit crunch almost two decades after she left office.
You try going on the BBC's Question Time and announcing that you are a Thatcherite. You will see the audience scratching and raging and panting like flea-ridden gibbons because Thatcher is a boo-word in British politics, a shorthand for selfishness and me-first-ism, and devil-take-the-hindmost and grinding the faces of the poor. . . .
. . . It is very hard to explain to young people the atmosphere of morbid self-pity that used to hang over Britain in the Seventies. British brands that had once been the envy of the world – machines whose manufacturers had out-engineered the Wehrmacht – had been reduced to laughing stocks, their reputations destroyed by a lethal combination of management inertia and union militancy. The country had so drifted from an understanding of free-market economics that Tony Benn actually tried to revive the motorbike industry with a sort of crazed commie collective at Meriden. There were endless strikes, and three-day weeks, and power cuts, and looming over it all was the Cold War – and the constant anxiety that we would somehow be embroiled in a conflict with the nasty, militaristic and totalitarian Soviet Union, a horrible place of gulags and lawless persecutions. Our food was ranked among the worst in Europe – by the British middle classes themselves.
Our children's teeth were ruined by a diet of Spangles, Curly-Wurlies and Tizer, and our weather was lousy. Mrs Thatcher set about changing virtually everything, except possibly the weather. . . .
[As regards the Falkland Islands, the] Argentinian junta had taken by violence a British protectorate, in clear contravention both of international law and the wishes of the islanders. It took fantastic balls to send the antiquated British Navy half-way round the world, and risk disaster on those desolate beaches and moors. It took nerves of steel to sink the Belgrano, and, frankly, I don't think there were any other Tory politicians who would have done it. She showed a streak of absolute ruthlessness in defence of British interests, and, as the Eighties went on, it was clear that she was broadly right about the economy as well. Together with Norman Tebbit, she did what Barbara Castle had tried and failed to do – to dethrone the union bosses and give British industry a chance.
By the time Arthur Scargill took the miners out on strike, I was firmly on her side. He was simply increasing the difficulties of a declining industry, and what the script of Billy Elliott will not tell you is that Scargill never held a proper ballot. By the end of the Eighties, she had cut taxes and the economy was roaring away; and it wasn't just that the country as a whole seemed to have recovered some of its confidence and standing in the world. Individuals were able to take control of their destiny in a new way. They were no longer completely beholden to local authorities for their housing: they could buy their own homes, and to this day, as any Tory canvasser will tell you, there are people across Britain who will always vote Tory in thanks for that freedom alone.
She gave people the confidence to buy shares, to start their own businesses, to move on and up in society – and there was more social mobility under Margaret Thatcher than there has been since. She was a liberator, and she gave the Labour party such an intellectual thrashing that they ended up changing their name. In some ways, the most significant political legacy of Margaret Thatcher is New Labour (now being abolished by Gordon Brown). Yes, she was provocative, and there are huge numbers of people who will never forgive her for saying that "there is no such thing as society. There are men and women, and there are families." It sounds frighteningly atomistic and strident, and does not seem to reflect the duty we all owe to each other.
But she believed she had to shatter the post-war consensus that the solution to every problem was always an expansion of the state. Indeed, she did not think much of the word consensus itself, since it was not only too Latinate for her taste but also because it probably masked a conspiracy by cowardly politicians to dodge the hard questions, and, if you look at the consensus that now exists around, say, academic selection, you can see that she is right.
Margaret Thatcher will always divide the British people, not least since we are ourselves divided. There is a part of us that will always dislike the acquisitive, appetitive instincts she seemed to espouse, and yet we also recognise that they are essential for economic success. More than any leader since Churchill, she said thought-provoking things about the relationship between the state and the individual. Some of them were unpalatable, some of them were exaggerated. But much of what she said was necessary, and it took a woman to say it.
Interestingly enough, I found no such retrospective in the Guardian, the unabashedly left wing paper in Britain that has long enjoyed the sport of Thatcher bashing. I hesitate to speculate as to the motivation for their silence.
At any rate, history, it is said, is written by the victor. It may well be that Margaret Thatcher's legacy in the British history books awaits the outcome of the campaign that Thatcher, like Churchill before her, waged against socialism. That is a battle still very much at issue. Churchill lost that battle. Thatcher won some major battles, mostly on the economic front. It is in the social and cultural arenas that the battleground now lies - and in the halls of the EU.
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