If you think the world is a mess now, that just means you weren't around in the 1970s.

In Britain, where I grew up, the low point was known as the Winter of Discontent, a line

borrowed from Shakespeare's Richard III. The inflation rate in 1975 was 27%. The trains

were always late, the payphones were all was broken, nothing worked. Worst of all were

the recurrent strikes, strikes by coal miners, strikes by dockers, strikes by printers, strikes

by refuse collectors, strikes even by grave diggers. It felt as if there was no way back,

and then came Margaret Thatcher. Between May 1979 when she entered

10 Downing Street as Prime Minister, and November 1990 when she stepped down, she changed everything.

Born on October 13th, 1925, she was an improbable savior. Nothing in her middle-class childhood

suggested the future ahead of her. A diligent student, she got into Oxford as a chemistry major.

She worked for a small plastics company after leaving college, but was rejected for a position

at the British Chemical Giant ICI because, as the personnel reports stated, this woman is headstrong,

obstinate and dangerously self-opinionated. She needed all three of those attributes when she

entered the world of politics as a conservative candidate in 1950. After several failures,

she finally entered Parliament in 1959. For the next two decades, she steadily worked her way up

through the party ranks. As early as 1975, Thatcher had come up with a wonderful line about the

opposition Labour Party. They have got the usual Socialist disease. They have run out of other

people's money. This, she contrasted memorably with what she called the British inheritance.

A man's right to work as he will, to spend what he earns, to own property, to have the state

as servant, and not as master. This was the essence of factorism, and it was just the tonic that

the patient, the British economy, needed. It's fashionable nowadays to argue that there was no

Thatcher miracle in the 1980s. Not only is that demonstrably false, it misses an essential point.

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