Maggie Thatcher’s Timeless Wisdom: She could see America Circa 2026 From the Last Century…

Maggie Thatcher, easily one of the greatest leaders of the 20th century, was a no-nonsense woman.  She became Prime Minister of the UK in 1979 and would rescue her nation from the economic quagmire created by the policies of her leftist predecessors.

Maggie was the daughter of a merchant. And as one might expect as the daughter of someone who had to deal with customers and vendors and regulators and all the while make sure there was something left in the bank at the end of the month, she was a straightforward and pragmatic leader.

For someone born almost exactly 100 years ago, she had a vision of government and culture that we could use more of today.  She was something of a combination of Nostradamus, Mark Twain and a Cassandra rolled into one. 

Her thoughts and observations provide an extraordinary insight into many of our problems today.

And the clarity began even before she was Prime Minister. On the day before her historic election she said this: “If a Government can't protect citizens and their property against violence, vandalism and theft, there is little point in having a government at all.” If anything resonates with Americans today it’s the fundamental failure of government to do exactly that.

In blue cities and states across America we see examples of career criminals regularly unleashed on their communities only to later kill or rape innocents. From suddenly being found not competent to stand trial to having their sentences slashed because of their age or background, American blood is spilling because Democrats care more about the “rights” of criminals than they do about the lives of innocent citizens. Thatcher cared about innocent citizens:  “I personally have always voted for the death penalty because I believe that people who go out prepared to take the lives of other people forfeit their own right to live.”

She also had a clarity on the economics of leftism, saying “Let us never forget this fundamental truth: the State has no source of money other than money which people earn themselves. If the State wishes to spend more it can do so only by borrowing your savings or by taxing you more. It is no good thinking that someone else will pay - that 'someone else' is you. There is no such thing as public money; there is only taxpayers' money.”

Maggie clearly understood what most American politicians don’t, which is that government can spend only as much as citizens produce.  Only through taxes or IOUs, can the government spend a single penny.  Given that our national debt is almost $40 trillion and our unfunded liabilities are approaching $100 trillion financed by a GDP of $30 trillion, another of her quotes drives home the reality: “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.”

As a merchant’s daughter, Thatcher understood what so many of our career politicians don’t, because so many of them have never had jobs or been part of an enterprise that actually created wealth – and just to be clear, lawyers rarely if ever actually create wealth or anything else of value.  “We have been ruled by men who live by illusions ... the illusion that there is some other way of creating wealth than hard work and satisfying your customers.” She hit the bullseye with: “The patronage state is an arrogant state. It assumes it can spend your money better than you do. Yet it expects you to work for it in the first place.”

Her observations went beyond just justice and economics however.  She recognized a moral cancer when she saw one. “Do you know that one of the great problems of our age is that we are governed by people who care more about feelings than they do about thoughts and ideas.” Her prescience presaged the cancer of DEI a generation before it began wreaking widespread damage on the American Republic.

Along those same lines, she anticipated the evolution of the left’s political MO beginning with the ascent of Barack Obama, where every critique, criticism or disagreement was labeled racism, then expanded to every element of American politics:  Homophobic, Islamophobic, Sexist, etc. She clearly recognized the tactics: “I always cheer up immensely if an attack is particularly wounding because I think, well, if they attack one personally, it means they have not a single political argument left.”

The Iron Lady addressed what would become one of America’s biggest problems when someone like Donald Trump, who is not a creature of the Swamp and wanted to upset the apple cart, came into office: “Whether it is in the United States or in mainland Europe, written constitutions have one great weakness. That is that they contain the potential to have judges take decisions which should properly be made by democratically elected politicians.” If there’s anything that characterizes America in 2026 it’s the army of black robe clad judicial activists who think they have the power to transform themselves into the Executive.  These leftist judges are making a mockery of our Constitution, and sadly, Congress and the White House are allowing them to do so.

She also understood the treachery of the elites that has been going on in America for decades. “There are too many people who imagine that there is something sophisticated about always believing the best of those who hate your country, and the worst of those who defend it.” From tedious Oscar speeches and championing of illegal immigrant criminals to the pillorying of men like Daniel Penny and Nick Shirley, the left does nothing so much as spit on fundamental American values and elevate those of deviants and the lawless. 

And she understood that the left was not only a danger at home, but was an equally dangerous threat on the world stage: “To the extent that the West is to blame at all for the ills of the Third World it is to the extent that the West created Marx and his successors, among whom must be numbered many of those who advised the Third World leaders in post-war years”. From the UN to the EU to the Democrat party, Marxism has probably caused more death and destruction across the country and around the world than probably any other philosophy in all of human history. 

And particularly resonant today is the fact that Thatcher understood what it meant to be an ally, saying this after allowing Reagan to use US bases on the UK to strike Gaddafi while other European allies wouldn’t allow him to use their airspace: It had the effect of cementing the Anglo-American alliance. What's the good of having bases if when you want to use them you're not allowed to by the home country. It made America realise that Britain was her real and true friend, when they were hard up against it and wanted something, and that no one else in Europe was. They're a weak lot, some of them in Europe you know. Weak. Feeble.”

There were many other jewels of course:

“Many of our troubles are due to the fact that our people turn to politicians for everything.”

“The price of freedom is still, and always will be, eternal vigilance.”

“Being powerful is a lot like being a woman: If you have to tell someone that you are, invariably, you are not.”

“Why in the world anyone in America is allowing another language (other than English) to be his first... I don't know”

Maggie Thatcher had a clarity of vision and an understanding of the nature of man and the nature of government that few Americans appreciate today and sadly, even fewer politicians. 

Most of these quotes were found on this site: 

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Constitution be Damned! Off With Their Heads! (Before they murder your daughter or your mother or you...)

The United States literally began with these words: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

What that actually means, particularly the pursuit of Happiness part, is different for different people. At a minimum however, we can all agree that Life means, well… life.

The above, of course, comes from the Declaration of Independence.  But that document doesn’t define the structure of our government, the Constitution does.  And from the Constitution we get our federal system, where (originally) the federal government had a number of well-defined and finite powers such as defense, foreign relations and adjudicating conflicts between the various states.  States on the other hand reserved all those powers not specifically prohibited to them or delegated to the federal government. 

And the truth is, that system worked very well for a long time.  About 150 years.  But, starting in the 1910s, with the passage of the 16^th and 17^th amendments, the line between the two started to blur, in the 1930s it began to be fray and by the 1990s it was basically gone, which is the situation we find ourselves with today. 

This evisceration of our federal system of checks and balances for all intents and purposes no longer exists.  From to welfare to education to employment to consumer products to media to farming to housing, the federal government is involved in virtually every other aspect of American lives. 

But you know one place where federal control largely doesn’t extend?  The criminal justice system.  That doesn’t mean there is there no federal involvement, because in reality, there is, but states exert more control over the criminal justice system than they do over other aspects of life like healthcare, automobiles, banking, etc. 

As it relates to America’s founding document, that’s a problem.  Not that I believe the federal government should take over everything.  Just the opposite, actually. Indeed, as I read the Constitution, 70% of what Washington does is blatantly unconstitutional.  I’m confident America would be a far more prosperous place if the federal government stopped doing most of what it does.

But, sadly, that’s not happening, and as the old adage goes: “When in Rome…” 

Chris Bray over at the Federalist had a piece the other day discussing federalism, and how because, blue states are so dysfunctional, the federal government is having to step in to protect dogs. Most certainly the Founding Fathers didn’t have protecting Fido in mind when they wrote the Constitution.  But you know what they did have in mind, and explicitly so?  The lives of Americans. 

Nonetheless, we are seeing across the country, from Virginia to Maine to California, state and or local governments failing to protect that most basic thing upon which America was founded: Life.  The reports and stories we seen regularly are heartbreaking.  We see a criminal with 40 arrests murder a young woman during a home invasion.  We see an illegal alien with 30 prior arrests fatally slash the neck of a random woman standing at a bus stop. We see a thug with 17 priors beat a 64 year old man to death in a subway because he didn’t like the way the victim looked at him.

For far too many criminals the justice system is nothing but empty threats, empowered by government employees more focused on leftist agendas than the safety of the citizens they serve.

Stephen Miller pointed out recently that western civilization only started flourishing after centuries of culling the most violent among them via capital punishment. I’ve often said that it’s impossible to go into a dark movie theater and fully enjoy the show if the entire time you’re worried that the guy behind you might shoot you in the back of the head.  Similarly, it’s difficult to build a functioning, flourishing society, one that advances science, technology and builds prosperity if the citizens of said society worry about being killed waiting for the subway or driving home from work or standing in line at some fast food restaurant. All of the creativity that a people might put into inventing new widgets or doing cancer research or teaching children how to read instead gets focused on how to avoid becoming a victim of crime.

These policies are the bleeding edge (literally) of George Soros’ and the swamp’s attempts to destroy the Republic and turn America into the leftist paradise they all dream of controlling.  And just as the as Communism in the 20^th century did nothing but deliver bloodshed, economic ruin and tyranny everywhere it showed its ugly head, we see the same thing in blue states and cities across America.

Given the failure of blue state / city judges, prosecutors and District Attorneys to protect the lives of their citizens, Washington should step in to do the job.  They won’t be able to protect everyone, but they will be able to tackle the problem in a way that the states and cities refuse to do. 

What kinds of things can be done?

First: Make murder a federal crime with capital punishment the sentence and a streamlined appeal process so that the process doesn’t drag on for years or decades.

Second: The federal government should begin to indict and imprison said judges, prosecutors and DAs every single time one of the career criminals they put back on the street kills someone. 

But, you might say, they have immunity. Maybe from state charges, but not from federal civil rights violations.  Think back to 1992 when the local jury acquitted the police officers of assault and use of excessive force in the beating of Rodney King. What happened then? The feds came in and charged them with violations of King's civil rights and won convictions. Frankly, that was a BS charge then, but the precedent was set. If using a baton on someone who put the lives of countless motorists at risk is a violation of civil rights then actually empowering the murder of someone is at least as much so. As such, given the role that the various government officials play in putting on the street career criminals who then go on to commit murder, the Justice Department should hold them accountable. 

What would the result of such a policy be? One would be that it would force government officials to weigh the potential consequences of releasing criminals into communities against the potential outcome to the community, and as a consequence, to themselves personally if that criminal murders someone.  Another would be that the amount of crime would drop precipitously as career criminals find themselves held behind bars far more often than they’ve become accustomed to.

None of this is ideal and this is not an ideal solution, but as Voltaire said: “Perfect is the enemy of the good”, and when government officials not only don’t protect citizens, but actively put them in harm’s way, they should pay for those decisions. Government without accountability is just another way of saying tyranny, something the Declaration of Independence was specifically written to oppose. 

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Compassion Has A Time And Place, But The Courtroom And Prison Are Not It

Mahatma Gandhi has been culturally deified since his death. The same is true of Martin Luther King, Jr. Both were brave, and, while preaching peace, compassion, and nonviolence, they literally walked into the batons of those who did not share that peaceful passion. Both men led movements that changed the way their nations functioned and, as a result, became larger-than-life figures.

But here’s the thing that most don’t recognize: They succeeded only because the people against whom they were fighting were moral people. I don’t mean that the people throwing slurs at or using guns or dogs against their followers were angels. Not at all. But the British people, in Gandhi’s case, and white Americans, in MLK’s, were largely moral people.

And how do we know that? Because Gandhi and King succeeded. The tactics both men employed would never have worked in most circumstances in human history, because the humanity shown by the British and the American whites was anomalous, frankly. The truth is, we’d likely never have known of them had they tried those tactics against the Nazis or the CCP or the Romans or the Mongols or Al Qaeda or the Aztecs...or virtually any other government or civilization in human history.

Such non-violent sentiments, particularly pacifism, may have a place in political discourse, but they’re not appropriate everywhere, and most certainly not at all times. Einstein was famously a pacifist almost his entire life. But even he abandoned that when the Nazis began targeting the Jews in pre-WW II Germany. He quickly reverted to it once the Germans were defeated in Europe, becoming an outspoken advocate for not using the nuclear weapons he had played an indirect role in developing, despite the horrors of the Japanese being at least equal to those of the Germans.

The problem with pacifism/non-violence is that it depends on the goodwill of the people being targeted. That might work if everyone on the planet were Mother Teresa, but most are not.

Which brings me to modern-day American leftists. We see in America today a tangential drive, one for compassion. But it’s compassion not for the victims of horrific crimes, but for the perpetrators. Between “bail reform,” “sentencing reform,” and the movement to replace police with social workers, it’s simply ludicrous. Indeed, wrong-headed “compassion” can be fatal.

Adam Smith famously said, “Compassion to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.” We see this no more clearly than with a spate of recent killings, with some of the most well-known being Iryna Zarutska, Nicola Tanzi, and Hunter Simoncic. The thing that one notices is that in every one of these cases, the killers had double-digit interactions with the justice system, often spending years in prison.

And it’s not just the cases that make the headlines that should concern us. It’s the information that doesn’t make the news that’s also concerning: Forty-seven percent of criminals who get sent to prison had at least 10 prior arrests, and fully 80% had at least three. And fully 80% of criminals re-offend within 5 years of release.

The problem is that leftists look at the world through the rose-colored glasses of Gandhi and MLK, but live in a world where the real color isn’t rose, it’s red, as in blood. Gandhi and MLK succeeded because the media in the UK and the United States shocked citizens into living up to their own ideals.

The fact that this worked for them was extraordinary, but the reality is that it doesn’t work for the millions of victims of violent crime every year. For every Timothy Bohler (45 prior arrests) or Sanchez Nicholson (33 arrests) or Courtney Boose (99 priors, never been in prison) who makes the news and outrages communities, there are thousands of other criminals walking the streets robbing, beating, raping, or attempting to murder mostly innocent victims.

Tim Hsiao had a great American Thinker piece last week titled Without Retribution, There Is No Justice. In it, he makes a compelling argument for capital punishment. He’s 100% right. His most salient point:

If punishment were only about deterrence or rehabilitation, then justice would become secondary to utility. It would mean that whether or not someone deserves punishment depends on how useful punishing him might be for society at large. That view erases the offender’s moral responsibility and reduces him to a means for producing good outcomes.

And that phrase “deterrence and rehabilitation” is the language of the left, not what someone deserves. While I applaud the deterrence element of prison and the chair, I’m not so keen on the “rehabilitation” part. The goal of the justice system should be one thing: Keep criminals from harming innocent civilians. Do that enough, and eventually they will learn, and other potential thugs in the making will figure out that crime is not a good career choice.

Now, taken to its extreme, this sentiment could mean executing every criminal every time. That’s clearly neither desirable nor practical—but neither is the system we have today, where criminals can spend practically their entire lives preying on innocents with only the most cursory of stints behind bars.

But “How can that be?” you might ask, given that the United States has the largest number of prisoners and the 5th highest prison rate in the world. Maybe, in contrast to the leftist narrative, the answer isn’t that those numbers are too high; it’s that they aren’t high enough, and the death penalty is not meted out enough.

El Salvador, the nation with the highest incarceration rate in the world, 1,659 per 100,000 vs. 541 per 100,000 in the United States, saw its murder rate decline by 98% over a decade after implementing effective, albeit admittedly draconian, law enforcement measures. But the result has been a citizenry that feels far safer, and international tourism has skyrocketed. The quality of life—and actual life in many cases—in El Salvador has improved tremendously.

While locking up prisoners can be expensive, what’s not usually counted is the cost to society of not doing so. Citizens being scared to walk around and engage in their communities has both psychological and economic consequences. Then there are the actual costs (ER and hospital care, lost wages, long-term care, disability, trauma, lost productivity, and quality of life) that run into the tens of billions annually.

Leftists focus their compassion on criminals. They pretend they’re champions for men like Gandhi and MLK, but in reality, they’re champions for men like Ted Bundy and Decarlos Brown, who’ve left nothing but blood and misery in their wake. And they use their power in the criminal justice system, the media, and the grifting NGO universe to inflict their fiction on communities across the country. Unlike the people whom Gandhi and MLK faced, those whom leftists force citizens to face are not moral.

Mankind has always had and will likely always have criminals. It does not follow, however, that civilized societies must allow them to terrorize and abuse citizens. It’s time for Americans to throw off the tyranny of the left’s Compassion Industrial Complex.

Compassion has a time and place, but the courtroom and prison are not it. The goal of the system should be to be sufficiently bad that no one ever wants to return to it. Criminals are humans too, and most humans respond rationally to incentives and disincentives.

It’s time for voters to decide which they prefer: To live in crimescapes like St. Louis, Chicago, or Baltimore, or in communities where they can talk to their neighbors, walk their dogs, and pick up their kids at school without worrying about becoming a statistic on a police blotter as their families’ lives are shattered.

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