A case for austerity: Margaret Thatcher

Wall Street Journal reviews the political life of Margaret Thatcher. If we are to learn from the history, she is one of the main figures to look at in connection to the European debt crisis: on the one hand, she successfully championed the austerity policies, which the Europe is trying to adopt nowadays... on the other hand, she vehemently opposed the European integration. (Also, I posted earlier this video where she expresses her views on the socialist welfare.)
 
Thatcher on fiscal discipline:
"What did she tell them? In essence, Margaret Thatcher's views about the relationship between money and politics are simple—her critics would say reductive. In 1949, when, as a 23-year-old, unmarried woman, Margaret Roberts was adopted as a Conservative parliamentary candidate for the first time, she said: "In wartime there was a slogan 'It all depends on me.' People seem to have forgotten that, and they think it all depends on the other person."

"Don't be scared by the high language of economists and Cabinet ministers," she went on, "but think of politics at our own household level."
She wasn't scared, and she never really deviated from such doctrines. They acquired great resonance in the 1970s, when inflation and excessive government borrowing and spending had become the norm. Indeed, they won her the general election of 1979. She preached that a household—and, most particularly, the woman who runs its weekly budget—knows that you cannot ultimately spend more than you earn and that you must "provide for a rainy day.

The same mythical housewife, Mrs. Thatcher asserted, also knows that if you do not provide you cannot be certain that anyone else will. Living beyond your means leads to dependency instead of independence, and dependency leads to degradation."

Thatcher on Keynes and "Keynesians"
"This was as true for nations, Mrs. Thatcher maintained, as for individuals. She was quite sophisticated enough to understand that nations can and sometimes must borrow and spend on a huge scale. She respected the teachings of John Maynard Keynes, while being highly suspicious of the subsequent generations of left-wing "Keynesians.""

Thatcher on the role of the government
"It would be hard to deny that Mrs. Thatcher succeeded in bringing some of this about. The top rate of income tax was 98% in 1979 and 40% by 1988. In 1979, Britain lost 29.5 million working days to strikes; by 1986, the figure was 1.9 million. When she started, Mrs. Thatcher had to deal with the most deficit-laden nationalized industries in the developed world. When she finished, the idea of privatization had become the most profitable piece of intellectual property ever exported by a politician."

Thatcher against European Union:
"Her most controversial remark was her attack on both statism and super-statism: "We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them reimposed at a European level with a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels." She was fiercely opposed to European economic and monetary union.

Last week's summit in Brussels took place exactly 20 years after the Maastricht Treaty, by which the EU agreed to establish a single currency (with Britain securing an opt-out). Today, the answer in Brussels to the problems caused by centralization is to centralize some more."