Morgan goes on to describe the backbench revolt that removed Thatcher from Tory leadership, partially because of the economic dislocation, partially because her “imperious style of leadership now seemed more of a liabilty” (Ibid). Thatcher’s government saw the same cyclical ebb and flow that affects market economies in general, with some policies reviving elements of the economy, and some policies injuring elements of the economy. But overall it trundled along, up and down, like any other market. Nonetheless, unemployment, particularly for laborers, was a perennial problem during Thatcher’s government that she and her cabinet never really sorted out.

As to the Falklands, given your comments, the inhabitants, the hundred or so sheep on the islands, must have declared themselves subjects of baaaritain. B’dom. Chish!

While I appreciate your comments on British policy in Ireland, I’m not sure that they, the peoples of the Indian subcontinent, the Chinese, the Egyptians, the Iraqis, black South Africans, the Sudanese, or anyone who had to put up with Cecil Rhodes at some point would agree on their “largely positive impact on history in general.” I’m sure you were referring to Britain’s representative democracy as example, various contributions in letters, arts, and sciences, and such, which is true. For a small country, they made an indellible mark on the world and offered many positive contributions. But the aforementioned subject peoples were probably glad to remove that mark (work in progress for the north of Ireland), and wish that the British would have made their contributions from home instead of inviting themselves to dine at their tables.

As in the United States, changing economies meant that some industries would be harder hit than others. Like the steel workers in Pittsburgh, the mine workers in England lost their jobs. But, it is not the government’s responsibility to maintain unprofitable mines at the cost of the rest of the nation. If you lose your job, get another one. It happens to most people. You don’t have a god given right to a job in the pits, or at the foundry. If the government provides unemployment benefits, and maybe some job training, that is appropriate. But it is not obligated to pay them to do a useless job.

The mine unions violently opposed this plan – understandably, perhaps. Organized labor is far less important or needful today, or twenty years ago, than it was a hundred years ago. In our country, the federal workers’ and teacher’s unions are far more powerful than they should be.

Dislocation happens to economies. Sometimes some bits get hit harder than others. But in a healthy system, like ours or Britain’s, new things come along. Over the last twenty years, we have developed several whole new industries that didn’t even exist in 1980. There are more jobs now than before. Unemployment has been very low in this country for most of the last two decades, thanks largely to the efforts of Reagan, and the British economy has been strong, thanks to Thatcher. While the mine workers lost their jobs, the rest of the economy benefited enormously, and in time, the unemployed mine workers joined the rest of the economy.

On the war angle, if Hawaii was invaded, I think we’d take it back. The Argentineans invaded the Mavinas to detract from the baleful effects of their socialistic economic program. The inhabitants of the Falklands were British, and didn’t want to be Argentine. The British went to war only after Argentina invaded – they did not provoke that war, as you imply. (Granted, she did use the big win for political purposes, but that was after the fact.)

Further, the Soviets were a threat. And Cold War strategy was rather more complicated than you state it. Deterrence may have prevented a full nuclear exchange – but it almost didn’t on at least two occasions. But the reason that we formed NATO, and had our troops right on the line, was so that any attack on Western Europe would be considered an attack on us. The reason for that was that if the Soviets, with their advantage in conventional weaponry in the fifties, sixties and seventies, had invaded, we would have lost. And losing Europe to communism would have meant that North America would be pretty much all that was left of the free world. From that position, it would be harder and harder for the United States to fight off the Soviet Union. That would be bad. Our nuclear arsenal kept that at bay. Also, building lots of nukes assured that he Soviets would not try a sneak attack – they were much more sanguine at the thought of losing a few million citizens, and might consider the losses if they could take us out completely.

By finally driving the stake into the heart of Communism, Reagan and Thatcher removed that threat. Now, millions who lived under totalitarian communist regimes are now free, and some are even becoming prosperous.

I don’t know about the poll tax. I’ll look into it.

No leader or nation, is perfect – but I don’t know that Roosevelt did a great deal to limit freedom in this country (though I could lose my membership in the vast right wing conspiracy for saying that.) Or Churchill either. The internment of the Japanese was wrong, certainly, as were the other things. But he did not leave this country substantially less free than when he found it. And some of those problems were solved later. The British lost much more of their freedom under Atlee than Churchill. Reagan did nothing that I can think of that reduced anyone’s liberty in this country. Pissed people off, sure, but not limit their freedom.

Defeating the Soviet Union and Communism was at least as important as defeating Germany and Nazism. The ones who finally managed it deserve credit for achieving it.

This kind of thinking is generally associated with the Chicago school - Hayek, Friedman, and that crowd. Historically, when taxes go down, revenue and the economy go up. Post WWII, post Kennedy, Reagan. When taxes went up in the sixties, by the seventies, the economy was a wreck. (Of course it is more complicated than that. But measures that limit the economy generally go hand in hand with higher taxes. So it evens out.)

And the real problem with deficit spending is not the military - which is a legitimate function of government constitutionally, but entitlement programs that inexorably spiral upwards in cost. There is no conceivable tax increase that would pay for what’s going to happen to Social Security and Medicare. If the economy grows fast enough, we’ll have more money for warm fuzzy programs, and for things that kill little brown people. Liberals and Conservatives will live together. Mass hysteria.

(Considering the vast expansion of the investor class, ironically one of Marx’ dearest hope - that the proletariat would own the means of production, has kind of happened.)

So far, the Chinese have successfully launched four test vehicles. The last, in November of 2002, was considered to be a full on test run that will lead directly to the first Chinese manned flight, probably before the end of the year. Once in space, very few missions could prepare a lunar mission. The United States did its moon missions all in one shot. However, a more cautious Chinese strategy might be to assemble a lunar vehicle in Earth orbit from two or three launches. A lunar shuttle could fly repeatedly between Earth and Lunar orbit, requiring only refueling. It would never need to land on Earth. A lunar shuttle could travel between the Lunar surface and orbit – again requiring only refueling. This strategy would give the Chinese a permanent capability to travel back and forth to the moon.

A Chinese presence in space, let alone on the Moon, would drastically alter the global strategic situation. Capabilities, rather than intentions are the key factor in military planning – and a space capable Chinese nation is an enormous threat to the United States that depends on space resources for military dominance here on Earth.

The flip side of this equation is the increasing investment in private space programs in the United States. Many computer industry billionaires are funding private space companies – including Jeff Bezos of Amazon, John Carmack of Id software (of Doom and Quake fame) and the inventor of Paypal, Elon Musk. As I have reported here, Burt Rutan has already flight tested an x-prize competitor, and hopes to take the prize on the centennial of the Wright brother’s flight. Rumor is that he has deep pocketed computer industry funding as well, to the tune of over $20 million.

If we just stand back from this burgeoning industry, and not let NASA or the FAA interfere, we will have an answer for any Chinese strategic challenge. There is no way that the Chinese government effort could compete with an unleashed American civilian effort. Once the door is kicked open – and the X-Prize will go a long way toward achieving that – it could explode; much like the computer industry did.

The current tax system runs to seventeen thousand pages of regulations. It is, literally, impossible for anyone to understand it. With even a moderately complex financial situation, there is no way to be assured that you are in compliance with the law. Every year, journalists will create a fictional family of four, with a reasonable spread of investments and assets, and earning something in the comfortable middle of the income spectrum. They will send this hypothetical tax picture to several IRS functionaries, tax accountants, and HR Block type tax preparers. No return will match any of the others. Better to spend your time figuring how many conflicted, compulsive centrists can agonize on the head of a pin.

On general principle, the current scheme should be completely scrapped. Vague and conflicting regulations make enforcement arbitrary and predatory. When you speak of fear of the government, most people don’t think Big Brother, they think the IRS. There is absolutely no need for a tax system this Byzantine, this elephantine, this cruel; especially in a republic with pretensions to liberty and justice. And beyond the costs of shoveling an average of a third of our income onto the IRS fire, there is the cost of preparing the tax returns themselves. Millions of man hours for the general public, billions spent by businesses and individuals to tax accountants and tax preparers that could be spent more profitably elsewhere. Further, there is the uncalculated effect of tax law on how businesses change practices to avoid punitive tax liabilities, like delaying replacement of aging capital equipment (a factor in the industrial decline in the Midwest), avoiding investment, delaying capitalization and a hundred other things to obscure for me to comprehend.

But what to replace it with? Conceivably, we could replace the current nightmare with something simpler that worked in largely the same way – tax brackets, deductions, credits – but easier to cope with. But if we are going to go to the effort to replace it, it ought to be something better.

I feel that the current tax system makes a mockery of our commitment to justice and equality before the law. If it is illegal to discriminate against someone for reasons of creed, color or gender, why is it kosher that a one set of tax laws applies to Mike, completely different set of laws applies to Mr. and Mrs. Two-Cents, and yet a third and even harsher set of laws applies to the Buckethead clan? If Mike were white, and Johnny Hispanic and me black, legions of the unwashed would rise up in protest. Yet, there is not a murmur of discontent when it is shown that these three have different incomes.

We should always be treated the same before the law. If I kill someone, the same law should apply to me as when Johno kills someone. Even if I did because they deserved it and Johno kills merely because they have bad taste in music. Similarly, the same tax laws should apply to everyone, even if one of us makes more money than the other. This is the primary moral argument for a flat tax.

If we assume that the current level of revenue is adequate for government needs (sharp internal wrenching pain) we could structure a new tax system that would generate that much money. One of the reasons that our tax system is so complicated is that all the many special interests, over decades, slowly weaved a web of exemptions, shelters, credits and what-have-you into the tax code. Most of these complications have no positive effect on the economy as a whole, and many are probably very negative. One way to eliminate unfairness is to completely eliminate all the complications. If every person, and every corporation, paid 10% of income to the government everyone would be on the same level. No industry would have special sanctions, or considerations. It would limit the government’s meddling in the economy. (Tax law is a great sub rosa way to meddle, because it is less obvious.)

The thing is, if I pay 10%, and Mike pays 10%, that’s fair – even though I will pay more in absolute terms. If it’s that simple, I can compute my tax return in seconds. Even corporations would have a simpler time of it. In the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation had high taxes. But almost no revenue, because the government was largely incapable of collecting it. When they switched to a flat tax, their revenue skyrocketed. One, because the lower tax rate was fair enough that many who had not paid taxes now paid them, and two, because it stimulated the economy. And if I know every corporation and rich person is paying ten percent, I’m much less likely to think that the fat cats are getting away with murder, because there would be no loopholes or tax shelters.

While I said earlier that the government shouldn’t use the tax system to meddle with the economy, or use it for social engineering, that is only generally true. While staying within the flat tax format – so that the same laws apply to everyone, we can fudge it a bit to have beneficent effects. For example, a certain standard set of deductions would apply to everyone’s income. A personal deduction, child deductions, mortgage interest, marriage deduction are all good candidates. These deductions would be set amounts, so the effect on someone with a low income would be proportionally much larger than for someone with a large income. You could finagle these deductions so that someone or a family at the poverty level would pay no tax. Then, as income increases, taxes would increase. By the time income got to a couple hundred thousand, it would look more and more like 10% as the deductions became a smaller and smaller proportion of the total income. This would help the poor, encourage marriage and children – but the same law would still apply to everyone. A similar situation could be imagined for businesses.

A flat tax of 15 to 17 percent would probably generate about the same revenue as the current system. And the rich would pay more taxes than they do now (though Democrats would still claim that it’s a tax cut for the rich.) But everyone would have the same, understandable law.

I’ll leave alone the Reagan issue, and will offer to agree to disagree on that score. On Thatcher, however, I will make a few remarks. Thatcher did a great deal to limit the freedom of British workers and engaged in the most brutal campaign against Catholics in the north of Ireland since her Tory predecessor Edward Heath’s government sanctioned the Bloody Sunday massacre in Derry. Under Thatcher and her own orders, rather than permitting the Blanketmen to wear their own clothes with prisoner of war status, many of the Blanketmen starved to death. In other words, Thatcher preferred that northern Irish Catholic insurgent prisoners starve rather than allowing them to wear civilian clothes.

Thatcher refused to negotiate with anyone. She would not negotiate with Irish insurgents, she would not negotiate with striking workers. She responded to strikes by closing factories and collieries, and putting thousands of British workers out on the street. She and her administration virtually liquidated the TUC, the cornerstone of British organized labor. She went to war with Argentina over the Falkland islands, a dagger pointed at the heart of Antarctica, in an archaic colonial war specifically designed to drum up reactionary patriotism. Thus, Thatcher beat up sixth graders as an adult. In the last year of her administration, Thatcher introduced a poll tax. Poll taxes are a tremendous limitation on freedom.

As to preserving the freedom of America by winning the Cold War, at what point could the Soviets have conquered the United States? The strategy was they nuke us, then we nuke them, and it’s all over. Cold War brinksmanship could have gotten us all killed. And I haven’t admitted that Reagan and Thatcher won the Cold War. I still adhere to my thesis that the Soviets simply couldn’t maintain the House that Stalin built and I’m not convinced that it was because they got into a spending arms race with the U.S. But we’ve had this discussion before, and it will remain forever unresolved and disagreed upon between you and I.

That aside, the above League of Superheros members Churchill and Roosevelt did lead the defeat of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, and Reagan and Thatcher won the Cold War, according to you, not me, but all of them did a great deal to limit the freedom of their own and subject peoples in various ways.

While even full production from the Iraqi oil fields would remain a relatively small part of the total oil production (even the Saudi’s immense reserves are only a quarter of total proven reserves) the effect of that production would be to drive down oil prices. And oil prices are one of the key factors in the world economy, because in some way or other, almost every business and industry is affected by oil prices. Shipping, energy, heating, plastics - the costs of all of these are all directly dependent on oil. Every other industry uses these services. When oil prices went up by 50%, it had the effect of a tax increase, because it increased the cost of doing business, or the cost of living. When they go down, it will act like a tax cut. And it won’t effect the government’s budget.

As the effects of this percolate through the economy, eventually the job market will catch up with the growing economy. Jobless rates are always a trailing indicator. If the economy is already recovering, great. The lowered oil prices will be a shot in the arm, revving up the recovery.