The Unreconstructed: ‘Thatcher Policies Still Resisted by Europe’

Some would rather wallow in misery than undertake a proven treatment:

Mrs. Thatcher’s prescription for Britain in the 1980s — faith in market forces, willingness to impose short-term austerity in the service of long-term prosperity, and skepticism or even hostility to the fiscal and social costs of the welfare state — prefigured some of the policies Germany and European regulators are still recommending, wrongly in the view of many economists, for the struggling Southern European countries.

But few of those nations, even in the hard-hit southern tier, have shown the political strength or will to face down the entrenched forces — unions, state-owned enterprises, encrusted political elites — that Mrs. Thatcher did, and the crisis drags on without resolution.

It is an indelible part of the Thatcher legacy that her success in remaking Britain never drew the Continent closer to its cantankerous, offshore cousins.

Via Thatcher Policies Still Resisted by Europe – NYTimes.com.

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