Collectivist spin

Wisdom from the 20th century's greatest female politician:

Under the Rudd-Gillard governments we have the culture Thatcher warned us against. In 1976, in one of the first speeches she made in Australia, she told a Canberra audience the real difference between conservatives and their socialist political opponents is that conservatives believe that government should act to enlarge the freedom of the individual to live his own life whilst socialists believe the government should diminish it.

“Our way upholds the importance of the individual and makes provision for him to develop his own talent. To us, all individuals are equally important, but all different. It is this difference which gives richness and variety, and strength, to the life of the community,” she said.

She also touched on “social justice” - the term used by members of the Rudd-Gillard government to justify increasing intrusion into private lives.

“Common to all collectivist theories is the presumption that ‘social justice’ is more equitable than justice to the individual; that the ‘social wage’ is more desirable than the income a man or woman earns, and spends or saves; that ‘classes’ matter more than people; above all, that ‘collective rights’ are more important than the rights of the individual citizen,” she said.

Thatcher demolished the concept of “collective rights” and used as her example the Soviet Union, where, she said, more than anywhere else, the collectivist dogma had - in the name of the “people” - made the state the owner and manager of all the means of production, distribution and exchange. And the result?

“Far from abolishing poverty, socialism has kept the vast majority of the Soviet people miles behind the western world in standards of living and quality of life,” Thatcher said.

“Instead of ‘superior productivity’ based on workers’ control, its state-owned industries and collectivised farms are steadily falling further and further behind those of the west. Socialist ‘realism’ has meant neither artists nor writers have been free to express their own ideas. Anything that conflicts with the collectivist mystique is feared, and is condemned and banned.
 

If I hear the words "for the people" usher from the mouths of these collectivist union puppets again I shall smash the TV (no I won't) but the verbal 'bovine faeces' these leftards spew is akin to fingernails scraped across an old-fashioned blackboard.