James Callaghan, the man who would rise to the occasion of taking Britain to the precipice of economic ruin as Prime Minister from 1976 to 1979 prophesyed in 1960 that "I have not the slightest doubt that the economic measures and socialist measures, which one will find in the countries of Eastern Europe, will become increasingly powerful against the unco-ordinated, planless society in which the West is living at the present."
John Kenneth Galbraith, Harvard windbag and l'eminence griseof the would-be economic planners wrote: "Partly, the Russian system succeeds because, in contrast with the Western industrial economies, it makes full use of its manpower."
And Paul Samuelson, also of MIT, added, "The Soviet model has surely demonstrated that a command economy is capable of mobilizing resources for rapid growth."
In the 1970s, virtually nobody saw Marxism-Leninism as an economic formula for the rape of the human soul. Rather, the Soviet system was widely seen as a thriving, innovative model from which the West had to borrow in order to be able to survive. Few dared challenge the wise men who told us that there was no hope, short of nuclear holocaust, of defeating the Soviet Union economically or militarily. As such, we had to learn to coexist with the Soviets, and accept their murderous ideology as a slightly different way of doing things - a way of doing things from which we in the "uncoordinated" and "planless" West surely had much to learn.
Policymakers in the West were intoxicated by this notion. In the 1970s, the Labour Government in Britain, acting under Clause 4 of the party's constitution which pledged to secure "for the workers ... the common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange" collectivized the automobile, aerospace, and shipbuilding industries just as surely as Stalin would have. In the United States, where laissez-faire was all but discarded, the Republican administration of Richard Nixon gave us wage and price controls - controls which culminated in 10% inflation and 21% interest rates.
When Jimmy Carter told America that a malaise was upon it, he expressed the real fear in the country that America had passed the zenith of its greatness, that a vulnerable and declining West was locked in an impossible struggle with a burgeoning Soviet Union, and that this was a battle that democracy seemed destined to lose.
I BEGIN THIS BOOK REVIEW WITH A HISTORY LESSON not only to depict the nightmare which Margaret Thatcher (and two years later, Ronald Reagan) faced when taking office, but also to remind us that the battle is not yet won. As we approach the ideal of a frictionless new economy, none of us wants to remember that that there was once a dark night in which most people actually believed that a planned economy of one sort or another was superior to freely managed economy based on consent.
To say that this world died twenty years ago would be a mistake. As recently as 1994, we in the United States had to fight off the attempted collectivization of the health care industry. And lest we forget, as late as the 1990-1 U.S. recession and the 1992 Democratic primaries, at a time when the Dow Jones Industrial Avergage hovered around 3000, demands for a European-style centrally planned industrial welfare state reached critical mass. I remember it. I was there.
The collectivists will always masquerade as "progressives," but in fact they are reactionaries and will always be reactionaries so long as the central fact of modern human history remains ever-expanding freedom, innovation and wealth through ever-increasing individual enterprise and private ownership.
Thatcher leapt onto the political stage at a time when her idea that free markets would produce better results than the wise men in Whitehall was seen as pure lunacy and blasphemy. Now, we know she was right. She knew that the profound crisis that enveloped the West was not a crisis of capitalism, but a crisis of socialism. History will record that they were the real progressives. The Collected Speeches of Margaret Thatcherreveals how Margaret Thatcher began to change her country, and wound up shaping a new world.
AT THEIR BEST, Margaret Thatcher's speeches exude a timeless quality almost unknown in an oratorical atmosphere polluted by endlessly test-marketed addresses spoon fed to focus groups in the hopes of detecting the political erogenous zones du jour. As such, they make for very good reading. This is odd, for in general, addresses that might seem stirring when uttered later make for very banal reading, little more than a series of disjointed and illogical soundbites. Start with some speeches by Tony Blair or Bill Clinton and you'll see what I mean. For these speeches, the magic lies on the surface, in the delivery. Beneath them is nothingness.
At first, this might seem the case for the first two speeches of this series, delivered before Mrs. Thatcher was elected Leader of the Conservative Party in February 1975. Then, she acts the role of the ambitious backbencher, making good common sense but unwilling to stick her head out too far, and striving to strike a conciliatory note in order to woo skeptics to her side in her bid to become party leader.
The series of speeches delivered during her tenure as Leader of the Opposition are masterpieces. They are learned and reflect a deep philosophical understanding of the moral and practical reasons why the free economy will always prevail over the collectivist alternative. These pieces of rational thinking from Mrs. Thatcher's speech before the Zurich Economic Society in 1977 draw the fundamental contrast:
She continues, outlining the moral fallacy of state control,
When have we ever heard any American politician speak in such clear, rational, and true terms about the superiority of the free over the planned economy? It seems we need to be reminded of these truths, as we are ever today reduced to a seemingly interminable rear-guard action against mini-statism of the Clintonian variety. We forget who the true progressives and the true reactionaries really are.
Reading this in a day when conservative leaders, unable to cope with the chameleonic transformation of the Left, have forgotten what they are fighting for - and against, Mrs. Thatcher's style is striking and refreshing. She correctly perceives the central question of her time (and ours) as the epic struggle between capitalism and socialism, between freedom and slavery, and makes this the central theme in many of her speeches.
At the same time, she directly confronts the standard criticisms of capitalism unapologetically, and is remarkably effective. How to defend, for instance the "acquisitiveness," the "selfishness," the "greed," which are in one form or another essential features of the capitalist system? Simple. Just recognize what every working man and woman knows - that money is not an end unto itself, but a means to an end, which is greater happiness, comfort, and stability for oneself and one's family. A staple of Thatcherite thought is the natural harmony of interests that all classes share in the free economy. In the Zurich speech, she foresaw that the "withering away of the class struggle" would come as a result of shareholder capitalism, not state socialism as Marx had said.
As such, Thatcher's rejected any false distinction between the pursuit of self-interest and social responsibility. "Without the strong," she reasoned, "who would care for the weak?" In order to care for the poor, a society must be able to generate the wealth and resources it takes to do so. And only the free economy can generate them. Thatcher pointed to the Victorian era as historical evidence (as unfashionable as it was to admit it). The gilded age, she showed citing several examples, also turned out to be a golden age for private charity.
The great contradiction of the socialist model is that it thinks it can provide social services by choking the very resources of a society that make them possible. The more they tax us to pay for their compulsory wars on poverty today, the more they stifle the engines of wealth creation for tomorrow, and the poorer and poorer they make us all in the long run.
A similar argument prevailed even when Thatcher split from the traditional Right in championing environmental themes in the late eighties and early nineties. Many of the purported environmental threats may be real, she said. But the solution was not to slow down the engine of capitalist development, as the Left proposed. Rather, the solution was to speed it up, so as to accelerate the progress which comes hand in hand with new, efficient and clean technologies. Private property ownership was the key: who would permanently despoil any land that was theirs? Rolling back the industrial revolution was the very opposite of what needed to be done to curb pollution, said Mrs. Thatcher. And she was right.
She was right about something else too - recognizing Marxism-Leninism for what it really was: a moral and philosophical cancer which had to be stopped. With Ronald Reagan, she helped to stop it. And even more than Reagan, she understood that Communist butchery and social democracy as practiced in the West were different ideas only in degree, not in kind. In the 1970s, she saw the very same kind of social and economic control practiced in the Soviet Union being used in a socialist Britain, in lesser but still oppressive form. She stopped it at once, and by making this vital connection she showed us that not only the struggle against Soviet tyranny epic and meaningful - so was (and is) the fight against the socialist, social democratic, and labor parties of the West.
When Mrs. Thatcher is ousted from office by a coup launched from her own party's backbench, the sympathetic and knowledgeable reader will feel sad to relive the memory of the dark day in November 1990 when she was forced out. But as a reader, one shouldn't, because this book teaches us that the best speeches are always made from outside of Government. This was true in the fighting, ideological tone of Mrs. Thatcher's speeches in Opposition. When she takes office, ideological concerns take a backseat to action in the Prime Minister's speeches, and usually the reader will find them shorter on philosophy, but longer on actual accomplishment. As such, they seem less effective, and here is why: Though practical accomplishment is the ultimate goal of political philosophy, it can never stir your blood like having to fight back as you do when you are the the political wilderness. To the philosophically disposed, speeches made in opposition are always the most eloquent, and those made from the pinnacle of power the most shabby. Therefore, the speeches Mrs. Thatcher makes when leaving office, which are often critical of the new government of John Major, begin to sound at once more poetic.
Outside of government, she deflates the arguments of the European federalists and the neo-statists, who, confronted with the miserable failure of socialism, are now constrained to devise new, more ingenious ways of controlling other people's lives. In one specific instance, I found my mind screaming out in agreement with the speech she gave in The Hague in 1992 attacking the incipient creation of a European federal state. Then, I remembered that it was on a previous reading of this same speech years ago that I began to base my opinion of the issue, so much did that speech make sense.
In this speech and in many others, she mixes domestic and foreign policy to put forward a unique vision of political economy of which Western decisionmakers should take heed. She rejects outright the notion of superpower competition between three hostile economic markets - America, Europe, and East Asia, for a similar situation precipitated World War II. Rather, she puts forward a vision of an Atlantic free trade zone, encompassing NAFTA, the EU, and the former Soviet bloc states in Eastern Europe, totalling 58% of the world's GNP, and providing the irresistible force for economic liberalism around the world. The cornerstone of this vision is strong, democratic, and proud nation-states, a healthy contrast to the soulless amalgamation proposed by the Euro-federalists and others.
In all, Thatcher's speeches never disappoint and show how libertarian-conservative ideals can be implemented and explained in the practical realm. They make hearty reading for anyone interested in the power of good ideas.