Anarcho-Capitalist Good News: Britain’s new leader is out to top ‘Iron Lady’ Thatcher

...But a different David Cameron has emerged, and his vision for Britain is every bit as radical in its way as the Iron Lady’s. In some respects he’s actually outdoing her: it wasn’t until Margaret Thatcher’s second term as prime minister (1983–87) that she began her nation-transforming moves in earnest, from selling off state industries to smashing the power of the unions. For his part, Cameron is wasting no time. Barely four months after moving into 10 Downing Street, he’s already constructing his promised Big Society. He’s decentralizing the health-care and education systems, overhauling the welfare system, and declaring war on government spending. As soon as he took office, Cameron got Parliament to enact $9 billion in emergency cuts from the current budget, amounting to nearly 1 percent of the roughly $995 billion total.

That was only for starters. Even the hardest-core Tea Partier would admire the ambition of Cameron’s chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, to effectively eliminate Britain’s deficit by 2015. When the results of a top-to-bottom review of government spending are issued next month, all departments except health care and foreign aid are expected to face cuts of at least 25 percent over the next four years. By the end of this first term, Cameron and Osborne’s plans would reduce spending to 39 percent of national income—down from 47 percent when they took office, and two points lower than the figure Thatcher had achieved when she left office in 1991. As many as 600,000 public-sector employees could lose their jobs in the process.

...And ironically, his ambitions may be even greater than Thatcher’s. Cameron wants to do more than pinch pennies: he wants to reform the very relationship between Britons and their government. As he sees it, the dominance of the state has sapped Britain’s sense of personal responsibility, and he wants individuals and neighborhoods to take back control of their own lives. “We believe that when people are given the freedom to take responsibility, they start achieving things on their own and they’re possessed with a new dynamism,” he says. In practice that means a multitude of changes to decentralize power, and a bigger role for the private sector in fields like drug rehab, with payment based on results. Not to mention a possible end to government coddling, like the $5,000-a-year cap on tuition for university students in England.

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Anarcho-Capitalist Good News: Britain’s new leader is out to top ‘Iron Lady’ Thatcher

Anarcho-Capitalist Good News: Britain’s new leader is out to top ‘Iron Lady’ Thatcher

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