Socialism died at the end of the 1980s. For sure, its corpse twitched and jerked for a few years but there's no doubt that it died. And that it won't be missed. Here's Dan Hodges reminding us:
She won. Hers was not a superficial victory, but a final settlement. In the 1980s the Left framed the battle with Thatcherism as a final reckoning. And they were right, it was. And it was Thatcher who emerged victorious.
In truth it wasn't just Margaret Thatcher or even her and Ronald Reagan. It was a catalogue of great men and women - Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel, Helmut Kohl, even Gorbachev from the evil empire.
Socialism died. The trouble is so many didn't get the news. They didn't see how free enterprise, free trade, privatisation and free capital movement - that lovely neoliberalism - was making the world a better place. Wealthier, happier, more equal - all the things those socialists claimed for their failed creed. Except for the actually working bit.
It beggars belief that intelligent people continue to delude themselves that we can plan, organise and direct all the economy. That clever men can make better choices for you and me than we can make for ourselves. Eastern Europe - all those Poles, Slovaks, Romanians and Bulgars we fear will flock to England - is poor because of socialism. It really is that simple.
The next generation has to destroy the shadow of this dead creed. Or else we will watch as other places - places we once pitied as starving basket cases - start to catch us up. Watch as we squander the inheritance of our past success on a make believe economy - one where public spending, the modern equivalent of taking in each others washing, creeps ever higher and where the chimera of borrowing-driven consumption eats away at wealth and prosperity.
If we don't slay socialism's shadow, we will all be poorer. And for some that may mean the relative poverty socialists bleat about becoming real poverty. A poverty created by the vainglory and hubris of the socialist.
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