i could be cruel

Margaret Thatcher died yesterday.

I could be cruel and give a link to the sequence in the Wizard of Oz where the munchkins (are they munchkins?  I forget) sing the song celebrating the fact that Dorothy has killed the wicked witch.  Suffice to say I'm not a fan.

She's a bit of a puzzle Thatcher - the conservatives seem to hold her up as some sort of beacon of conservatism, but in reality she was actually the opposite.  Thatcher was a Libertarianist, which is she believed in individual freedom, freedom of the market (basically unrestrained capitalism) and small government.  She had more in common with the Tea Party in the US than she did the conservatives.  Yet she was also the leader that took us into Europe, which is essentially about the opposite.

Conservatism is about the maintaining of the traditional social structures - in our case that particularly emphasises a royalist structure, though tempered nowadays towards a democratic version.  Conservatism is about the old guard, lords and ladies, the idea of 'social betters', that rank has meaning and that there are elites.

Thatcher was, in essence, more opposed to these ideas that with them.  She often railed against experts and "old boy's networks", though I think with a desire to maintain the basic ranks - she would never have done away with them, but would prefer they had no actual influence.

Of course neither of these are in synch with my own political beliefs.

I'm more left leaning, probably ending up most squarely in the "democratic socialist" camp, due to an acknowledgement that communism is unlikely to work until technology progresses to such a degree that it renders much of what we squabble over mute.  Imagine if you could buy a machine that would be able to manufacture anything you need (think Star Trek replicator) - what use would money, gold and jewels be if your machine could simply make them?  These new 3D printers are a step in that direction.

The worst thing that Maggie did was deregulate the markets.  That, in essence, is the root cause of the huge pickle we have now found ourselves in.

She didn't invent the idea of a deregulated market, but began the implementation of it in this country during the 1980s, with a similar process going on in the US (the so called "Reagenomics").  The up-side is that very clever people get to find extremely inventive ways to make money.  The down-side is that the market wrap themselves in such knots that one failure causes a massive cascade of failures and also, those clever people who are making money are also then not constrained by things like morals and ethics.

The fundamental flaw in the system is also the central belief - that deregulated markets will not act in such a way as to be self-destructive.  I don't see how this could ever have seemed like a sensible or logical thought process.  It's like saying that people who drive cars will never be reckless enough to have an accident.  Firstly it ignores that external forces may cause an accident, but it also ignores the fact that the market is underpinned by people, and people can be just as moronic as you imagine - indeed, more so.

Of course it's not entirely her fault - others did the same thing and successive governments had ample opportunities to reverse the policy or otherwise rein it in - but the implementation all traces back to Maggie.