The Socialist Dragon Slayer

Winston Churchill described socialism as “the morbid doctrine that nothing matters but the equal sharing of miseries.” He spoke of the “inexhaustible” follies of socialism. But while Churchill often mocked socialism, he did not dedicate his political career to its destruction. That is where the great wartime leader most differed from Lady Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s prime minister from 1979 to 1990 -- that, and the fact that she came along several decades after him.… which was more than enough time to demonstrate the accuracy of Churchill’s sallies against socialism. Unlike Churchill (either during World War II or in his second premiership from 1951-55), Thatcher did not seek peaceful co-existence with prevailing socialist orthodoxies. She hated the false pieties of leftwing/socialist thinking and she laid Britain’s long-term economic decline from the end of World War II to the mid- and late-70s squarely at the feet of the baleful influence of socialism. In well-chosen words that seem eerily apropos to our time and country (from her speech to the Conservative Party Conference in 1978), she spoke of how Britain had been undone, not by “unusually wicked people,” but those with “enough good intentions to pave the well-worn path twice over”:

The root of the matter is this: We have been ruled by men who live by illusion: the illusion that you can spend money you haven’t earned without eventually going bankrupt or falling into the hands of your creditors; the illusion that real jobs can be conjured into existence by Government decree, like rabbits out of a hat; the illusion that there is some other way of creating wealth than hard work and satisfying your customers; the illusion that you can have freedom and enterprise without believing in free enterprise; the illusion that you can have an effective foreign policy without a strong defense force; and a peaceful and orderly society without absolute respect for the laws.

Free enterprise capitalism was not something that T...