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.