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.
Or, you know, THE FUCKING BANKS.