Thatcher's legacy

On the day Margaret Thatcher is being buried, the national debate centres on her legacy. It goes without saying that I am opposed to everything she stood for but I wish the reader to know the principal reason why. It is because she was wrong, and it's as simple as that. Thatcher is not personally responsible for what is wrong with the UK today, but she is most certainly fundamentally responsible, as she laid a philosophical and theoretical course that has been adopted and followed by all UK politicians since, and the theoretical and philosophical foundations are wrong.

When Thatcher made her famous statement that there is no such thing as society, she did so for a very fundamental reason. She saw a society she hated and was determined to destroy that society because she had the power to do so. The first step was to deny the existence of that society because if there is no such thing as society, then society has no responsibilities, not for health, education, welfare etc. As a result if there is no social and collective requirement for the provision of such services then they only need to be available if there is a market demand that can be met for a market price. Thus, in order to marketise health and education etc. she first had to portray them as something that was both dispensible and then replaceable with free market provision. It has to be admitted that she was remarkably successful, as she appealed to the lowest common denominators of greed and selfishness and denied that any of us have any form of social responsibility for our fellow human beings, because there is no such thing as society. So we can be as greedy and selfish as we wish and feel good about it, because we are doing the right thing. In addition, if some people cannot afford to purchase health or education then that is not your fault and they only have themselves to blame. Her denial that there is no such thing as society is a denial that the human being is a social being and is, instead, an atomised individual.

But not only her social philosophy was wrong, so was her economic. I have said before how free market economists misquote and misrepresent Adam Smith. For example, the most influential economics textbook since the second world war was undoubtedly Paul Samuelson's Economics which was studied by tens of thousands of economics students, and in which Samuelson makes the fundamental error of telling us that, according to Adam Smith


each individual in pursuing only his own selfish good was led, as if by an invisible hand, to achieve the best good of all, so that any interference with free competition by government was almost certain to be injurious. 

The problem with this  is that Smith said no such thing. He neither described people as selfish, nor argued that any interference by government was injurious. He told us how people could be very selfish, but argued that the basic human nature was in fact characterised by sympathy. In addition, the invisible hand was not an economic concept, it was something else.

This is not the place to elaborate on such theoretical concepts, but suffice it to say that Thatcher was responsible for basing government policy-making on fundamental errors that have had profound implications that have resulted in economic and social crisis in modern Britain. If you base your theories on false hypotheses, then you can only reach false conclusions. Thatcher's (and all subsequent policy-making) hypotheses were wrong. The tragedy is that all parties, and particularly Labour, are still wedded to these spurious economic theories, and that is why they cannot provide a solution to our problems as they are using the false assumptions that brought us to crisis in the first place. Britain's problems are fundamentally ideological and theoretical, and we are ruled by people who simply do not understand what they are talking about. You cannot apply the economic theories of Adam Smith or anyone else if you don't understand them in the first place.

Your Servant
Doktor Kommirat