Newspapers announce the death of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.In our modern age, when a famous person dies, the tendency is to overstate both their successes and their flaws.
When the recently deceased is possibly the most important woman of the past century, and one of the most influential women in the history of the world, the exalted celebrations and the malicious criticisms are magnified to the point that the person’s actual achievements are lost. That’s what happened when former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher died on Monday.
Certainly history overrates Thatcher’s importance on an international level. During the 1980s the United Kingdom was a valuable strategic ally to America, but hardly a partner of equal standing or similar importance. The fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War were due much more to Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev than the grocer’s-daughter-turned-world-leader.
But Thatcher’s importance to British domestic policy cannot be overstated. Piece by piece, Thatcher attempted to dismantle the socialist structure that suffocated the British economy. And she was extraordinarily successful in that effort.
By employing free-market, limited-government economic philosophies, Thatcher turned the stagnant British economy into the fourth largest in the world.