Margaret Thatcher Socialism Quotes

The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.

The slow cancellation of the future has been accompanied by a deflation of expectations. There can be few who believe that in the coming year a record as great as, say, the Stooges’ Funhouse or Sly Stone’s There’s A Riot Goin’ On will be released. Still less do we expect the kind of ruptures brought about by The Beatles or disco. The feeling of belatedness, of living after the gold rush, is as omnipresent as it is disavowed. Compare the fallow terrain of the current moment with the fecundity of previous periods and you will quickly be accused of ‘nostalgia’. But the reliance of current artists on styles that were established long ago suggests that the current moment is in the grip of a formal nostalgia, of which more shortly. It is not that nothing happened in the period when the slow cancellation of the future set in. On the contrary, those thirty years has been a time of massive, traumatic change. In the UK, the election of Margaret Thatcher had brought to an end the uneasy compromises of the so-called postwar social consensus. Thatcher’s neoliberal programme in politics was reinforced by a transnational restructuring of the capitalist economy. The shift into so-called Post-Fordism – with globalization, ubiquitous computerization and the casualisation of labour – resulted in a complete transformation in the way that work and leisure were organised. In the last ten to fifteen years, meanwhile, the internet and mobile telecommunications technology have altered the texture of everyday experience beyond all recognition. Yet, perhaps because of all this, there’s an increasing sense that culture has lost the ability to grasp and articulate the present. Or it could be that, in one very important sense, there is no present to grasp and articulate anymore.

Socialists cry “Power to the people”, and raise the clenched fist as they say it. We all know what they really mean - power over people, power to the State.

Law and order is a social service. Crime and the fear which the threat of crime induces can paralyse whole communities, keep lonely and vulnerable elderly people shut up in their homes, scar young lives and raise to cult status the swaggering violent bully who achieves predatory control over the streets. I suspect that there would be more support and less criticism than today's political leaders imagine for a large shift of resources from Social Security benefits to law and order - as long as rhetoric about getting tough on crime was matched by practice.

Now, I have always wanted to agree with Lady Bracknell that there is no earthly use for the upper and lower classes unless they set each other a good example. But I shouldn't pretend that the consensus itself was any of my concern. It was absurd and slightly despicable, in the first decade of Thatcher and Reagan, to hear former and actual radicals intone piously against 'the politics of confrontation.' I suppose that, if this collection has a point, it is the desire of one individual to see the idea of confrontation kept alive.

And I will go on criticising Socialism, and opposing Socialism because it is bad for Britain (...) It’s the Labour Government that have brought us record peace-time taxation. They’ve got the usual Socialist disease – they’ve run out of other people’s money.

Nazism (national Socialism) and communism (international socialism) were but two sides of the same coin.

The trouble with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money. —Margaret Thatcher T

Many things in this period have been hard to bear, or hard to take seriously. My own profession went into a protracted swoon during the Reagan-Bush-Thatcher decade, and shows scant sign of recovering a critical faculty—or indeed any faculty whatever, unless it is one of induced enthusiasm for a plausible consensus President. (We shall see whether it counts as progress for the same parrots to learn a new word.) And my own cohort, the left, shared in the general dispiriting move towards apolitical, atonal postmodernism. Regarding something magnificent, like the long-overdue and still endangered South African revolution (a jagged fit in the supposedly smooth pattern of axiomatic progress), one could see that Ariadne’s thread had a robust reddish tinge, and that potential citizens had not all deconstructed themselves into Xhosa, Zulu, Cape Coloured or ‘Eurocentric’; had in other words resisted the sectarian lesson that the masters of apartheid tried to teach them. Elsewhere, though, it seemed all at once as if competitive solipsism was the signifier of the ‘radical’; a stress on the salience not even of the individual, but of the trait, and from that atomization into the lump of the category. Surely one thing to be learned from the lapsed totalitarian system was the unwholesome relationship between the cult of the masses and the adoration of the supreme personality. Yet introspective voyaging seemed to coexist with dull group-think wherever one peered about among the formerly ‘committed’. Traditionally then, or tediously as some will think, I saw no reason to discard the Orwellian standard in considering modern literature. While a sort of etiolation, tricked out as playfulness, had its way among the non-judgemental, much good work was still done by those who weighed words as if they meant what they said. Some authors, indeed, stood by their works as if they had composed them in solitude and out of conviction. Of these, an encouraging number spoke for the ironic against the literal mind; for the generously interpreted interest of all against the renewal of what Orwell termed the ‘smelly little orthodoxies’—tribe and Faith, monotheist and polytheist, being most conspicuous among these new/old disfigurements. In the course of making a film about the decaffeinated hedonism of modern Los Angeles, I visited the house where Thomas Mann, in another time of torment, wrote Dr Faustus. My German friends were filling the streets of Munich and Berlin to combat the recrudescence of the same old shit as I read: This old, folkish layer survives in us all, and to speak as I really think, I do. not consider religion the most adequate means of keeping it under lock and key. For that, literature alone avails, humanistic science, the ideal of the free and beautiful human being. [italics mine] The path to this concept of enlightenment is not to be found in the pursuit of self-pity, or of self-love. Of course to be merely a political animal is to miss Mann’s point; while, as ever, to be an apolitical animal is to leave fellow-citizens at the mercy of Ideolo’. For the sake of argument, then, one must never let a euphemism or a false consolation pass uncontested. The truth seldom lies, but when it does lie it lies somewhere in between.

The Margaret Thatcher syndrome, that is, the woman who achieves seniority, but refuses any gender identification and indeed whose policies harmed many women, highlights that gender sensitivity is more significant in leading change than the biological sex of post-holders.

Psycho-compulsion is therefore not just about instilling people with a so-called correct employability mindset. It is a mechanism for penalising deviation from what it defines as the right set of attitudes and behaviours. ‘What psycho-compulsion therefore attempts to do is silence alternative discourses to the neoliberal myth that you are to blame for your unemployment,’ said Friedli. ‘At the same time, it undermines and erodes alternative frameworks around which people can come together in solidarity to act against the social causes of worklessness.’ In short, psycho-compulsion not only pathologises and punishes a claimant’s dissent, it depoliticises the causes of joblessness (which discourages collective action), and it does so by resuscitating Margaret Thatcher’s earlier myth that unemployment can be reduced to character deficiencies.

Neoliberal ideology has radically altered our working lives, leaving us isolated and exposed. The ‘freedom and independence’ of the gig economy it celebrates, in which regular jobs are replaced by an illusion of self-employment, often translates into no job security, no unions, no health benefits, no overtime compensation, no safety net and no sense of community. In 1987, Margaret Thatcher said the following in a magazine interview: I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand ‘I have a problem, it is the Government’s job to cope with it!’ or ‘I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!’, ‘I am homeless, the Government must house me!’ And so they are casting their problems on society, and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families, and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.8 As always, Thatcher was faithfully repeating the snake-oil remedies of neoliberalism. Precious few of the ideas attributed to her were her own. They were formulated by men like Hayek and Friedman, then spun by the think tanks and academic departments of the Neoliberal International. In this short quote, we see three of the ideology’s core tenets distilled: First, everyone is responsible for their own destiny, and if you fall through the cracks, the fault is yours and yours alone. Second, the state has no responsibility for those in economic distress, even those without a home. Third, there is no legitimate form of social organization beyond the individual and the family. There is genuine belief here. There is a long philosophical tradition, dating back to Thomas Hobbes,9 which sees humankind as engaged in a war of ‘every man against every man’. Hayek believed that this frantic competition delivered social benefits, generating the wealth which would eventually enrich us all. But there is also political calculation. Together we are powerful, alone we are powerless. As individual consumers, we can do almost nothing to change social or environmental outcomes. But as citizens, combining effectively with others to form political movements, there is almost nothing we cannot do. Those who govern on behalf of the rich have an incentive to persuade us we are alone in our struggle for survival, and that any attempts to solve our problems collectively – through trade unions, protest movements or even the mutual obligations of society – are illegitimate or even immoral. The strategy of political leaders such as Thatcher

To cure the British disease with socialism was like trying to cure leukaemia with leeches.” —Margaret Thatcher

The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other peoples' money.

Socialism is like one of those horrible viruses. You no sooner discover a remedy for one version, than it spontaneously evolves into another.

Socialists don't like ordinary people choosing, for they might not choose socialism.

The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money

Socialists ignore the side of man that is the spirit. They can provide you shelter, fill your belly with bacon and beans, treat you when you’re ill, all the things guaranteed to a prisoner or a slave. They don’t understand that we also dream. —PRESIDENT RONALD REAGAN The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money. —BARONESS MARGARET THATCHER

The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money.

To Margaret Thatcher’s mind, the cure for the British disease was to root out socialism entirely, end deficit spending, reduce the power of unions, privatize the nationalized industries, reduce taxes, restore respect for business and wealth, and revive British pride and patriotism.

Margaret Thatcher said: ‘Socialism only works until you run out of other people’s money.

When Margaret Thatcher transitioned her speaking voice to a more male register to be listened to by men of the House of Commons, she was not scrutinised in the same way a trans man would be - her voice was mainly praised ... becoming more masculine is always [socially] favoured over perceived femininity.

The problem with socialism is that eventually, you run out of other people’s money. Margaret Thatcher

Who is society?” demanded then–British prime minister Margaret Thatcher in 1987, justifying her relentless attacks on social services. “There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families.” That bleak view of humanity—that we are nothing more than a collection of atomized individuals and nuclear families, unable to do anything of value together except wage war—has had a stranglehold over the public imagination for a very long time.

Global warming provides a marvelous excuse for global socialism. " Margaret Thatcher

No theory of government was ever given a fairer test or a more prolonged experiment in a democratic country than democratic socialism received in Britain. Yet it was a miserable failure in every respect. Far from reversing the slow relative decline of Britain vis-à-vis its main industrial competitors, it accelerated it. We fell further behind them, until by 1979 we were widely dismissed as 'the sick man of Europe'...To cure the British disease with socialism was like trying to cure leukemia with leeches.

El socialismo es un sistema que prefiere que los pobres sean más pobres con tal que los ricos sean menos ricos.

Margaret Thatcher: ‘Socialism is great—but eventually you run out of other people’s money.

Which brings to mind a quote from Margaret Thatcher: ‘Socialism is great—but eventually you run out of other people’s money.

Nadie está realmente solo en ninguna isla. El individuo es una fi cción. Hay que darle la vuelta a la frase de Margaret Thatcher –la sociedad no existe– y recordarle que quien no puede existir sin la sociedad es el individuo. (¡Cuánta historia social tenemos cada uno desde que nacemos!) Por eso hay que defender la libertad de cada persona –siempre amenazada por otras fi cciones–, algo que sólo es posible cuando, como especie, nos hemos dotado de capacidades que nos permiten afi rmarnos y pretender constantemente burlar la muerte, en lo material y en lo simbólico

When I first started looking into this depressing state of affairs, I figured America’s efforts to reduce poverty had stalled because we had stopped trying to solve the problem. I bought into the idea, popular among progressives, that the election of President Ronald Reagan (as well as Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom) marked the ascendancy of market fundamentalism, or “neoliberalism,” a time when governments cut aid to the poor, lowered taxes, and slashed regulations. If American poverty persisted, I thought, it was because we had reduced our spending on the poor. But I came to realize that the reality was far messier. President Reagan expanded corporate power, massively cut taxes on the rich, and rolled back spending on some antipoverty initiatives, especially in housing. But he was unable to make large-scale, long-term cuts to many of the programs that make up the American welfare state. When the president proposed reducing Social Security benefits in 1981, Congress rebuffed him.[7] Throughout Reagan’s eight years in office, antipoverty spending did not shrink. It grew and continued to grow after he left office. In fact, it grew significantly. Spending on the nation’s thirteen largest means-tested programs—aid reserved for Americans who fall below a certain income level—went from $1,015 a person the year Ronald Reagan was elected president to $3,419 a person one year into Donald Trump’s administration.[8] That’s a 237 percent increase.