Goodbye and Good Riddance

It's goodbye and good riddance to Margaret Thatcher.

Her beliefs were based on the crackpot Austrian economic school, the forerunners to the "philosophy" of American crackpot Milton Friedman:

Hayek had started after World War I as a hack writer in the pay of rent-gouging Viennese landlords who wanted propaganda articles condemning the evils of rent control. He was considered a very marginal academic, almost a crackpot, until he attracted the attention of economic illiterate David Rockefeller, who hired Hayek to help him in cramming for exams at the London School of Economics.

Hayek, like his co-thinker Ludwig von Mises, was an exponent of the backward and primitive Austrian school of economic theory, which had been concocted by feudal-reactionary quackademics in the Habsburg empire to undercut the prestigious German-American school of dirigism and protectionism exemplified by figures like Friedrich List, one of the main inspirations for the recent economic success of places like Japan, Taiwan, and China.

For the Austrian school, any government intervention in or regulation of economic life is automatically classed as totalitarianism. The Austrian school relies on crude slogans of deregulation, privatization, and the free market. The Austrian school is sometimes called the psychological school, since it rejects as collectivist analyses which tried to grasp the broad objectivity of a national economy. The theoretical vantage point of the Austrian school is always the sociopathic urges and desires of the individual predatory speculator.

Lousy Politicians Department

It's time for WSWS to give a eulogy it is so good at. This time it's for Margaret Thatcher:

Margaret Hilda Roberts embodied everything that is narrow-minded and philistine in the English middle class. She was preoccupied solely with self-advancement and enrichment, owing much of her success to having secured a rich husband. Her political talents, such as they were, consisted of the nasty cunning and ruthlessness of the social climber.

Of far more interest than her personal biography are the historical circumstances that enabled such a relative non-entity and political sociopath—epitomised by her declaration, “There is no such thing as society”—to rise to such a position of prominence.

Thatcher’s ascent to the leadership of the Conservative Party in 1975 expressed the right-wing shift in British and international politics that developed with the receding of the wave of explosive class struggles that had wracked Europe between 1968 and 1975. She was the chosen vessel of the most corrupt and reactionary elements within the British ruling class—those most bitter at her predecessor Edward Heath’s defeat by the miners’ strike of 1974.

Thatcher is indelibly associated with the presidency of Ronald Reagan—with her espousal of the monetarism of Milton Friedman complementing the pursuit of “Reaganomics” in the United States. Aimed at removing all limits on private wealth accumulation, her premiership (1979-1990) was conducted under the banner of “rolling back” the frontiers of socialism. By this was meant the overturning of all the social gains won by the working class in the post-war period.

Good thing she is dead and is spared this fond remembrance.

Not to mention all of the parties celebrating her demise.
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And speaking of crappy neolib politicians, Obama is hellbent on destroying the New Deal and Great Society in the name of idiotic "austerity" that will make the economy worse.

He's doing what his Wall Street masters want him to do.

As the Washington Post commented, “The budget request reflects Obama’s stark shift in strategy over the past month, as he has adopted a far more congenial posture toward the opposition.” Obama plans to sit down for dinner with Republicans Wednesday, within hours of the announcement of his budget.

Far from drawing the line at the cuts Obama has already proposed, Democratic Party leaders have indicated that the latest budget would be the stepping-stone toward further concessions to Republican demands. Chris Van Hollen, the ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee said, “From the Republican perspective, the president’s budget is the starting point for negotiation.”

He's a no good bastard. He should simply switch political parties.

Obituary: Margaret Thatcher

Former UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher, 87, has died from complications of a stroke. She was the first woman to hold that job.

I don't have a whole lot of good to say about her because she was one of the first politicians to swallow hook, line, and sinker the batshit economic theories of crackpot "economist" Milton Friedman, to the dismay of the citizens of that country. Unfortunately, she wasn't the last politician to swallow that bullshit; it continues across the pond with that fake Democrat in the White House.

Snip:

Mrs. Thatcher, 87, was Britain’s first female prime minister, serving for 11 years beginning in 1979. She was known as the Iron Lady, a stern Conservative who transformed Britain’s way of thinking about its economic and political life, broke union power and opened the way to far greater private ownership.

The daughter of a grocer, she was leader of Britain through its 1982 war in the Falklands and stamped her skepticism about European integration onto her country’s political landscape for decades.

Though Mrs. Thatcher had been in poor health for months, the news of her death still overwhelmed many. Within moments of the announcement by Lord Bell, Queen Elizabeth II and Prime Minister David Cameron offered tributes to what Mr. Cameron called “a great leader, a great prime minister, a great Briton.”

On Monday, Mr. Cameron cut short a visit to Spain and France — billed as the beginning of an effort to resolve his own troubled relationship with much of continental Europe — to return to Britain following Mrs. Thatcher’s death.

Thatcher wasn't very good for the country.