Taxes: Instruments of Oppression

While there are a few things worse than taxation - famines, plagues, and wars - it is still true that taxes are one of the worst things which a government can inflict upon its own people. When a government levies taxes - when a government steals from its own people - it not only denies them the earned fruit of their own labor, but it denies them the material means by which they can exercise their freedom.

To be sure, humanity is often tempted to value material possessions too much, and value the life of the heart and mind too little. But opposition to taxation is not mere crass materialism. Rather, by opposing taxation, one manifests an understanding of the fact that material goods, used freely by their rightful possessors, are the means to expressing the life of the heart and to expressing the life of the mind. To deprive a citizen of his property is to deprive a citizen of his freedom. Yet the government, the very purpose of which is to protect a citizen's life, property, and freedom, is guilty of denying the citizen his freedom when it divests him of his property.

Concrete examples show us that taxation is one utensil in the portfolio of oppression. Whether labeled as "tributes" or "user fees," governments use taxes to subjugate populations. Around 1240 A.D., the Mongols invaded and occupied southern Russia. As one textbook, World History: Patterns of Interaction (McDougal-Littell, 2007), describes it,

The Mongols demanded just two things from the Russians: absolute obedience and massive amounts of tribute, or payments. By and large, the Russian nobles agreed. Novgorod's prince and military hero Alexander Nevsky, for example, advised his fellow princes to cooperate with the Mongols. The Russian nobles often crushed revolts against the Mongols and collected oppressive taxes for the foreign rulers.

Oppressors usually find willing helpers - those who will harm their fellow countrymen in return for a sycophantic chance to gain favors from the tyrants. Whether Russian nobles willing to harm their fellow citizens, or bureaucrats working for the IRS, governments require and develop apparatuses - sometimes sophisticated ones - for collecting taxes. Perhaps one of the most notorious such systems was the "tax farming" system used in parts of the Roman Empire.

People generally despise tax collection agencies of all variations. Those Russian aristocrats who aided the Mongols did so by ruining their reputation among their fellow Russians:

During the 1320's, Moscow's Prince Ivan I had earned the gratitude of the Mongols by helping to crush a Russian revolt against Mongol rule. For his services, the Mongols appointed Ivan I as tax collector of all the Slavic lands they had conquered. They also gave him the title of "Grand Prince." Ivan had now become without any doubt the most powerful of all Russian princes. He also became the wealthiest and was known as "Ivan Moneybag."

The situation of the Mongols in Russia is one among many examples of the tension between the legitimate need for a government to have some small source of funds for its legitimate activities on the one hand and its illegitimate tendency to expand its revenues and activities beyond the practical minimum. How can a society allow its government to levy some small tax, and yet ensure that the government's greed does not cause it to tax more than the least feasible amount? This question, in varied forms, arises for every civilization. The ability to answer this question is the key to that civilization's survival. Senator Goldwater writes:

We all have heard much throughout our lifetimes, and seen little happen, on the subject of high taxes. Where is the politician who has not promised his constituents a fight to the death for lower taxes — and who has not proceeded to vote for the very spending projects that make tax cuts impossible? There are some the shoe does not fit, but I am afraid not many. Talk of tax reduction has thus come to have a hollow ring. The people listen, but do not believe. And worse: as the public grows more and more cynical, the politician feels less and less compelled to take his promises seriously.

The senator goes on to distinguish between the false notion that a government has an "unlimited claim" to the property and income of its citizens and the plausibly true proposition that a government might have some limited claims on its citizens. Given the reality of the world as it is - imperfect - and the reality of human nature as it is - also imperfect - we must acknowledge that government is, in the words of Thomas Paine, a necessary evil. If government is necessary and the world imperfect, then taxes will also be necessary. Although necessary, they must be strictly limited and held to the lowest conceivable minimum.

We have been led to look upon taxation as merely a problem of public financing: How much money does the government need? We have been led to discount, and often to forget altogether, the bearing of taxation on the problem of individual freedom. We have been persuaded that the government has an unlimited claim on the wealth of the people, and that the only pertinent question is what portion of its claim the government should exercise. The American taxpayer, I think, has lost confidence in his claim to his money. He has been handicapped in resisting high taxes by the feeling that he is, in the nature of things, obliged to accommodate whatever need for his wealth the government chooses to assert.

When the government confiscates people's money and property, it also reduces their freedom. Whether in Mongol-dominated Russia or in twenty-first century America, resistance to taxation is a defense of freedom. From the Magna Carta to the English Bill of Rights of 1689, from the First Continental Congress to the Second Continental Congress, thinkers who have coherently advocated liberty have, as a corollary, consistently sought lower taxes.

Islam and Taxes

The religion of Islam appeared around 630 A.D., and a century later, its armies had occupied much of North Africa, Spain, Arabia, and other parts of the Near East. To finance these military actions, and the occupational governments which ruled over the populations of the conquered lands, Islam needed to raise funds. It did so through plunder and booty, confiscating valuables in the lands it invaded, but also through taxation.

Shortly after Muhammad died in 632 A.D., and shortly after Abu-Bakr became his successor, the central role of taxation in Islam emerged. Some Muslims who had followed Muhammad did not want Abu-Bakr as the next Islamic leader. According to World History: Patterns of Interaction, they

refused to pay taxes, and a few individuals even declared themselves prophets. For the sake of Islam, Abu-Bakr invoked jihad. The word jihad means "striving" and can refer to the inner struggle against evil. However, the word is also used in the Qur'an to mean an armed struggle against unbelievers. For the next two years, Abu-Bakr applied this meaning of jihad to encourage and justify the expansion of Islam.

Already in a very early stage of Islam's development, taxation is a major issue, and it is linked to jihad - linked to the military expansion of Islam. It is important to remember that the word jihad probably did once refer to an inner psychological or spiritual struggle against evil, and may even still occasionally be used that way. Note also that this first major Islamic tax controversy was not related to the taxation of the oppressed peoples in the lands conquered by Islam, but rather related to the taxation of Muslims by their leaders.

As Muslim armies conquered and occupied vast territories in Spain, North Africa, Arabia, Mesopotamia, and Persia, those subjected to Islamic military government would also face taxation. Those in such territories were taxed according to their religious status. If they converted to Islam, they would pay a lower tax rate. Those who chose to remain with their own culture's native religions were treated more harshly: "They paid a poll tax each year" which might be in coin, in agricultural goods, or in the form of having one's children confiscated to be slaves or laborers.

Starting around 750 A.D., the Caliphate - the Islamic empire - fell under the control of a dynasty called the Abbasids. One of their goals was to conquer and occupy Gaul - what we now know as France. The first attempted Islamic invasion of France was in 732 A.D., but this attempt had failed. The Abbasids would try again. This effort would require a large imperial military, and lots of money - money to be gained by taxation.

The Abbasids developed a strong bureaucracy to conduct the huge empire's affairs. A treasury kept track of the money flow. A special department managed the business of the army.

The Abbasids would fund their military buildup with taxes that disproportionately burdened the residents of lands occupied by Islamic armies, and of those residents, the taxes would disproportionately burden the non-Muslims, who conveniently lacked any political influence whatsoever. These non-Muslims were also, on average, poorer than the Muslims in their regions: poorer both than the locals who had converted to Islam, and than the occupying Islamic soldiers who were foreign to the region.

To support this bureaucracy, the Abbasids taxed the land, imports and exports, and non-Muslims' wealth.

But not all taxes collected were for military expansions. Some went to support the luxurious style of a the Caliphs - the leaders of the empire. Some went to support the mosques and the religious leaders - mullahs and imams. Some of it was collected for the purposes of helping the poor.

India and China: Learning about Taxation from History

Between roughly 400 B.C. and 550 A.D., a series of major empires established themselves in India and China. Their tax policies partially determined their durations and ultimate declines. Imperial governments which levied more than the lowest practical amounts of tax were often overthrown.

For example, the Indian emperor Chandragupta Maurya, who ruled from approximately 321 B.C. to approximately 297 B.C., financed a lavish lifestyle for himself. To the east of India, Seleucus ruled an area which had been part of the empire of Alexander the Great; Seleucus sent an ambassador named Megasthenes to visit Chandragupta Maurya. Megasthenes wrote a famous account about the wealth of India's emperor, including descriptions of the amount of gold used in the emperor's palace.

To pay for his personal wealth, as well as to fund his military, Chandragupta Maurya stole from the people of India. According to World History: Patterns of Interaction (McDougal-Littell, 2007),

He divided the empire into four provinces, each headed by a royal prince. Each province was then divided into local districts, whose officials assessed taxes and enforced the law.

Taxes were not always paid in coin (paper money had not yet come into common use). Sometimes the government required taxes to be paid in the form of labor: either as a solider or as a worker building a magnificent structure for the emperor. Chandragupta Maurya stole huge amounts of money, as well as agricultural produce, from the people:

The government levied high taxes. For example, farmers had to pay up to one-half the value of their crops to the king.

Chandragupta Maurya started an era known as the Mauryan Empire. A later phase of Indian history, from approximately 320 A.D. to 535 A.D., is the Gupta Empire. The people likewise suffered because of harsh taxation. Amazingly,

There was a tax on water, and every month, people had to give a day's worth of labor to maintain

the emperor's projects. The ruler stole from the people. When taxes exceed the smallest practical amount, they are theft.

As in Mauryan times, farmers owed a large part of their earnings to the king.

Two principles emerge from the details of these empires. First, taxation is necessary; for common military defense and to maintain a legal system. Second, if taxes exceed the lowest practical amount, they inflict misery on people; this is true even if the taxes are instituted in order to fund some activity which is well-intended and designed to benefit the people. Both the Mauryan Empire and the Gupta Empire fell, in part, because of the people's anger about taxes. In China, the Qin Dynasty fell after the death of emperor Shi Huangdi.

Rumblings of discontent during the Qin Dynasty grew to roars in the years after Shi Huangdi's death. Peasants were bitter over years of high taxes.

The common people resented the "harsh labor quotas" and other methods devised by the government to steal from the people. Invariably, government officials, who have much wealth already, work to take even more from the common people, who have less. The Chinese rebelled against the Qin Dynasty because of its taxes. One of the rebel leaders was Liu Bang. He later ruled from 202 B.C. to 195 B.C. and became known as Emperor Gao.

To win popular support, Liu Bang departed from Shi Huangdi's strict legalism. He lowered taxes.

Throughout history, rebellions have often been organized because of taxes. People find taxes to be politically intolerable. From Rehoboam in the Ancient Near East, to King George III in 1776, the worst governments and the most cruel tyrants are those who tax. Revolution is the people's desire for freedom, and taxation is the enemy of freedom.

Sadly, Liu Bang's successors did not maintain his policies. The Han Dynasty, which replaced the Qin Dynasty, slowly drifted back into the habit of raising taxes instead of lowering them.

The Chinese emperor relied on a complex bureaucracy to help him rule. Running the bureaucracy and maintaining the imperial army were expensive. To raise money, the government levied taxes. Like the farmers in India, Chinese peasants owed part of their yearly crops to the government. Merchants also paid taxes.

Again the bureaucrats, who have more, find ways to steal from the common people, who have less. Leaders like Liu Bang, who can resist the temptation to take money from the people, are rare in history. In China, the Han Dynasty was not content with stealing money from the ordinary people.

Besides taxes, the peasants owed the government a month's worth of labor or military service every year. With this source of labor, the Han emperors built

some useful things, like roads and the additions to the Great Wall, but also many personal luxuries and palaces for the Dynasty. Even when the taxes and forced labor were used in projects for the common good, like roads, the money was used wastefully and inefficiently. When government officials obtain funds for a specific project, like building a road, they ask for, and receive, more money than the project actually costs. The extra money they use to buy luxuries for themselves or to hire friends - even if there is no work for the friends to do.

The attitudes of Liu Bang lived on. There naturally arises, among any people oppressed by taxation, the desire for liberty. Ban Gu and Ban Zhao, two ancient writers who recorded the history of the Han Dynasty while it was happening, are cited in World History: Patterns of Interaction as they comment on the need to free people from taxation:

Agriculture is the foundation of the world. No duty is greater. Now if [anyone] personally follows this pursuit diligently, he has yet [to pay] the impositions of the land tax and tax on produce ... Let there be abolished the land tax and the tax on produce levied upon the cultivated fields.

Ban Gu and Ban Zhao are pointing out that a farmer, who is already doing a very difficult job, should not have, on top that, to pay taxes. They are demanding the abolishment of two particular taxes, and a reduction in taxation as a whole.

In sum, throughout history, taxes are and have been the tools of oppression. A government's taxes can never be too low; they are usually too high. Rulers are very creative in finding excuses to take money from their people. The government may claim that it is doing work which will benefit the people, or it may warn that if it doesn't take the people's money, it will go into debt - or further into debt. Both arguments are specious: projects done for the common good can often be done better by other social institutions and not by the government; debt can be reduced or avoided when the government simply spends less. Few things are more harmful to the human race than taxes.

Saving Lives in Poland

Across Europe, during WWII, brave and creative people invented a variety of ways to hide Jews from the Nazis, or to smuggle them to safe regions. Amazing events took place as secret operations hid or transported the Jews inside Nazi-controlled areas.

In Germany, for example, ecumenical networks organized the rescue of Jews - the word 'ecumenical' reflecting the fact that Lutherans and Roman Catholics were willing to set aside their differences in order to oppose the Nazis and save as many Jewish lives as possible.

In Poland, however, the situation was different. Poland was, at the outbreak of the war, approximately 95% Roman Catholic and 5% Jewish (exact numbers vary). There was no need for an ecumenical spirit: the Polish underground was seamlessly Roman Catholic. Among the many tales of heroism emerging from wartime Poland is the narrative of a zoo in Warsaw which was used to hide Jews from the Nazis. Historian Diane Ackerman writes:

Jan and Antonina Zabinski were Christian zookeepers horrified by Nazi racism, who capitalized on the Nazis' obsession with rare animals in order to save over three hundred doomed people. Their story has fallen between the seams of history, as radically compassionate acts sometimes do. But in wartime Poland, when even handing thirsty Jew a cup of water was punishable by death, their heroism stands out as all the more startling.

The occupation of Warsaw (and the rest of Poland) was a long affair. Nazis had occupied the city since October 1939. The Nazis would leave in January 1945, as the Soviet Army began its occupation of the city. After more than five years of Nazi oppression, the city of Warsaw would then be subjected to Stalinist oppression. The Nazi occupation was, of course, explicitly anti-Semitic, pursuing its objective of killing as many Jews as possible.

Unlike other occupied countries, where hiding Jews could land you in prison, in Poland harboring a Jew was punishable by immediate death to the rescuer and also to the rescuer's family and neighbors, in a death-frenzy deemed "collective responsibility." Nonetheless, many hospital workers disguised adult Jews as nurses, drugged small children to quiet them before smuggling them out in knapsacks, and planted people in funeral carts under a heap of corpses. Many Christian Poles hid Jewish friends for the whole length of the war, even though it meant reduced rations and relentless vigilance and ingenuity. Any extra food entering the house, unfamiliar silhouettes, or whispers seeping from a cellar or closet might inspire a visiting neighbor to notify the police or tip off the city's underbelly of blackmailers. The wayfarers often spent years in the dark, barely able to move, and when they finally emerged, unfolding their limbs, their weak muscles failed and they needed to be carried like a ventriloquist's dummies.

As the brave citizens of Warsaw continued to preserve the group of Jews hidden in the zoo, the war progressed. The Soviet army was advancing toward Warsaw from the east; the Poles anticipated that the Russians would liberate them from the Nazis. At the same time in 1944, thousands of Polish soldiers, organized as the Home Army, were preparing to stage a massive resistance action, later known as the Warsaw Uprising. This action was to be timed to coincide with the Soviet army's approach to the city. This would have confronted the Nazis simultaneously both with the Soviet attack and with the internal uprising - hastening the liberation of the city. "On July 27, when Russian troops reached the Vistula sixty-five miles south of Warsaw," Ackerman writes that the Nazi

Governor Hans Frank summoned 100,000 Polish men between the ages of seventeen and sixty-five to work nine hours a day building fortifications around the city, or be shot. The Home Army urged everyone to ignore Frank's order and start preparing for battle, a call to arms echoed the next day by the Russians, pushing closer, who broadcast in Polish: "The hour for action has arrived!" By August 3, as the Red Army bivouacked ten miles from the right-bank district that included the zoo, life grew even tenser.

The anticipation was agonizing,

and people kept asking: "When will the Uprising start?"

On August 1, 1944, the Uprising began. The Home Army anticipated that the Soviet soldiers, camped only a few miles away, would attack the Nazi occupational troops at the same time, and make quick work of liberating Warsaw. Instead, the Russians did nothing. Without Soviet support, the Polish resistance was facing the Nazis alone, a difficult or even impossible assignment. Historian Michael Korda places the Warsaw Uprising in the larger context of the European Theater of WWII:

In the east, of course, a war on an even larger scale was taking place - the front line ran from Memel on the Baltic to the Danube in Bulgaria, with a huge, threatening bulge developing in the south, where the army groups of Marshals Malinovsky and Tolbukhin were advancing swiftly to take Belgrade, surround Budapest, and approach within fifty miles of the German-Hungarian border. In the north, fanatical German resistance had stalled the Russians in East Prussia; but in the center the Russians at last held Warsaw. The Russians had paused for two months in sight of Warsaw to allow the Germans to savagely put down an uprising led by the Polish government in exile - which was based in London - so that Stalin could replace the so-called London Poles with his own communist Poles: one of the darkest and most cynical chapters in a war of stygian darkness.

Stalin was willing to let the Home Army die, man by man, at the hands of the Nazis. Once the Polish resistance had been exterminated, the Soviet army would then occupy Warsaw - not liberate it. Once the Poles knew that their defeat was certain, soldiers of the Home Army began to escape from the neighborhoods surrounded by Nazis. They eluded the Nazis by sneaking out through the underground sewer system. Diane Ackerman writes:

By September, 5,000 soldiers in the old town had escaped through the sewers, despite Germans dropping grenades and burning gasoline down the manholes. Elsewhere, the Allies were advancing on all fronts: after liberating France and Belgium, the United States and Britain were pushing into Germany from the Netherlands, Rhineland, and Alsace; and though the Red Army paused near Warsaw, it had already captured Bulgaria and Romania, was prepared to take Belgrade and Budapest, and planned to storm the Reich from the Baltics; the United States had landed on Okinawa and was pounding the South Pacific.

The war seemed to be progressing toward its end in every place except Warsaw. The Uprising continued, with no help from the Soviets and therefore no prospect of success. Yet the Poles fought fiercely and the Nazis found that they could not easily quash the Uprising. Soon negotiations between the leaders of the Home Army and the Nazi officers took place, trying to find terms of a ceasefire. On October 2, 1944, the Home Army surrendered, and Warsaw was once again occupied by the Nazis.

Although the two months of the Uprising were over, life was still very tense for the residents of Warsaw who were hiding and supporting Jews. For three agonizing months, they lived with the knowledge that the Soviet army was camped only a few miles away and yet refusing to drive the Nazis out of Warsaw. Every day was a risk; if the occupying Nazis discovered that a Roman Catholic Pole was helping a Jew, both would be executed. Finally, however, the Soviet army took action, having waited so long to allow the Nazis to eliminate more Poles, and to allow the Poles to eliminate more Nazis. Diane Ackerman writes:

The Red Army finally entered Warsaw on January 17, long after the city's surrender and too late to help. In theory, the Russians were supposed to drive out the Germans, but for political, strategic, and practical reasons (among them, losing 123,000 men en route), they had camped on the east side of the Vistula River and complacently watched the bloodshed for two months solid, as thousands of Poles were massacred, thousands more sent to camps, and the city extinguished.

The relief was minimal: Warsaw did not erupt in joy and celebration. By the time the Nazis left, the horror had been too great and gone on too long to allow for festivities. When the Soviets took over, it soon became clear that their use of the word 'liberation' was insincere indeed. The Soviet communists subjected Poland to a dictatorship that was, if somewhat less anti-Semitic, nearly as harsh as the Nazis had been.

Nonetheless, the bravery of Poland's Roman Catholics saved thousands of Jews. The courage of these Poles has been acknowledged and honored worldwide.

Thatcher's Place in History

By early 1979, the citizens of England were suffering as the consequence of years, and even decades, of economic policies which had ruined the formerly healthy British economy. After WWII, the English government began to nationalize many businesses. Ordinary citizens were no longer allowed to be partial owners of these businesses; rather, the government taxed citizens, took their money, and used that money to purchase the businesses so that the government owned them. Instead of several thousand people each owning a small share of a steel or coal company, the government owned the entire company by itself.

As the sole owner, the government controlled the company’s activities. When ordinary citizens own a company together, they are inclined to adjust the company’s activities based on changes in the economic climate. But when the government owns and controls a company, it does not have to respond to economic conditions. Government ownership means that a business will make its decisions without regard to realities like the price of energy or interest rates. As the British government owned more and more industries, its decision-making was more and more removed from reality.

When the government’s poor management of these companies caused them to lose money, instead of making money, the government simply taxed the citizens and took more money from them to make up the difference. Historian William Duiker writes:

The establishment of the British welfare state began with the nationalization of the Bank of England, the coal and steel industries, public transportation, and public utilities such as electricity and gas. In the area of social welfare, the new government enacted the National Insurance Act and the National Health Service Act, both in 1946. The insurance act established a comprehensive social security program and nationalized medical insurance, thereby enabling the state to subsidize the unemployed, the sick, and aged. The health act created a system of socialized medicine that forced doctors and dentists to work with state hospitals, although private practices could be maintained. This measure was especially costly for the state, but within a few years, 90 percent of the medical profession was participating. The British welfare state became the model for most European countries after the war.

Thus began the slow decline which would drive the British ever deeper into economic failure. Having been nationalized, the banks, the steel companies, the coal companies, the electrical utilities and the gas utilities manifested ever-shrinking profits, and then ever-growing losses. The nationalization of both medical insurance and health care was massively expensive, but the industries, because they were nationalized, could generate no wealth to pay for the medical health system. Taxes were raised steadily, driving family incomes down. The government also began to borrow money and thereby created a national debt. The quality of healthcare also steeply declined. Only the very wealthy could afford to leave the government system and seek adequate health care in private practices. The nationalized health system began with the goal of providing quality healthcare to all, but ended instead by limiting the poor and middle-class citizens to substandard government hospitals. This outcome was inevitable, despite the good intentions of the Parliament.

By May 1979, the British economy was a mess. In that month, Margaret Thatcher took office as the nation’s first female prime minister. But to her mind, it was far more important that she was the first prime minister to have a degree in science. She had studied chemistry at Oxford, and had worked in the private sector for years. She brought a scientific perspective to economic policy. Her logic was rigorous. So it was, then, that common sense

returned to power under Margaret Thatcher (b. 1925), the first woman prime minister in British history. Thatcher pledged to lower taxes, reduce government bureaucracy, limit social welfare, restrict union power, and end inflation. The “Iron Lady,” as she was called, did break the power of the labor unions. Although she did not eliminate the basic components of the social welfare system, she did use austerity measures to control inflation. “Thatcherism,” as her economic policy was termed, improved the British economic situation.

Prosperity did not return immediately to England after Thatcher’s introduction of economic freedom. It was a type of “shock therapy” which at first caused the economy to stall. Thatcher understood, like a physical therapist, that short-term pain brings long-term gain. After a brief uptick in problems like unemployment, Thatcher’s policies brought solid prosperity to England.

Thatcher had rescued Britain from policies which would have destroyed it, but she endured tremendous opposition. Those employed by the governments to oversee nationalized industries had well-paid comfortable jobs, even if their companies lost money year after year. Political groups had arisen over the years to elect representatives to Parliament to keep the money-losing nationalization schemes in place. The hatred directed toward Thatcher was bitter. It took not only her logical understanding of economics, but also her character and courage to implement her policies in the fact of such intolerant opposition. Charles Moore writes:

The Iron Lady is the name of the new film in which Meryl Streep stars as Margaret Thatcher. You have only to consider the title itself to understand the impact of the person portrayed. It helps explain why, in these hard times, she and her legacy arouse even more interest than they did in the boom era at the end of the 20th century.

Thatcher not only changed the British economy; she changed the presuppositions of economic and political leaders in many countries. By the time she left office, even the political party which opposed her had embraced many of her policies. Tony Blair, not a member of her party, carried Thatcherism forward when he was elected to office by the party which had opposed Thatcher. In Europe, leaders began to rethink nationalization of industries and socialized medicine. Several European nations avoided economy decline by embracing Thatcherism. Those nations which did not follow Thatcher’s lead paid the price, like Greece, as they endured painful economic collapses.

Margaret Thatcher showed the way toward economic sanity in the 1980’s, and for those who are willing to think carefully, her policies continue to show the way today.

The Iron Lady Saves England

She was without question the most powerful and the most influential woman of her time: that's a fact. She was also someone who demonstrated virtue in a way which regenerated people in more than one nation: that is also a fact, not an opinion. She was Margaret Thatcher, prime minister of England from May 1979 to November 1990.

In early 1979, England was economically at the brink of total collapse. The nation's financial structure had been decimated by taxes, debt, deficits, government spending, and regulation of the markets. The results were inflation and unemployment. As George Will writes, it was "Margaret Thatcher who helped bury socialism as a doctrine of governance."

Like a bucket of cold water on a drowsy snoozer, Thatcher's introduction of radical economic freedom came at first as a shock to the system. At first briefly painful, as the vital signs of the economy were forced to hit bottom to jump-start a wave of entrepreneurial activity, Thatcher's leadership was invigorating and bracing in the long run. Her tactics foreshadowed the economic doctrine of 'shock therapy' which would deliver freedom a few years later to the nations of Eastern Europe as they emerged from the tyranny of Soviet communism.

She aimed to be the moral equivalent of military trauma, shaking her nation into vigor through rigor. As stable societies mature, they resemble long-simmering stews — viscous and lumpy with organizations resistant to change and hence inimical to dynamism. Her program was sound money, laissez faire, social fluidity and upward mobility through self-reliance and other “vigorous virtues.” She is the only prime minister whose name came to denote a doctrine — Thatcherism. (“Churchillian” denotes not a political philosophy but a leadership style.) When she left office in 1990, the trade unions had been tamed by democratizing them, the political argument was about how to achieve economic growth rather than redistribute wealth, and individualism and nationalism were revitalized.

Earning for herself the reputation of being a woman of ideas, and earning for her Tory party the reputation of being the party of ideas, her intellect extended beyond domestic economics. Donald Rumsfeld, who was Special Envoy to the Middle East in January 1984, was working to see if any solution could be found to the bitter and complex civil war which was destroying the country of Lebanon, when he met with Margaret Thatcher. Although Thatcher was generally and often allied with the United States, she was not afraid to disagree: she pointed out to Rumsfeld that American diplomats were sending mixed messages. Rumsfeld writes:

When I met with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, she made it clear as only she could that when it came to U.S. policy on Lebanon, she was at best a reluctant team player. I had long been a fan of "the Iron Lady," as the Soviets called her. I found that her stern reputation masked a dispassionate realism - which was certainly visible in her approach to the Middle East. In our meeting, she bore to the heart of the issue with crisp, unforgiving precision. She was skeptical of Lebanese President Gemayel's ability to expand his coalition and, in a break from the American position, equally skeptical of Israel's role in the standoff. She believed that our coalition lacked a clear mandate. She did not favor taking a tough stance with Syria because she believed that we needed them for a successful Middle East peace effort. She noted that even when the United State challenged Syria, some American officials behaved in a way that signaled to the Syrians that we lacked the will or cohesion to actually follow through. A mixed message was the worst kind to send to an authoritarian regime, she noted. In that, as in many things, she was absolutely correct. If anyone left our meeting with an impression other than that the Prime Minister would be happy to be done with the whole business at the soonest possible opportunity, they hadn't been listening. In her public statements Thatcher was more diplomatic, offering words of solidarity with her political soul mate, President Reagan. But she also indicated what I knew well: our time was running out.

Later in that same year, Thatcher demonstrated courage in the face an attack on her life. Rumsfeld writes:

A month later, Prime Minister Thatcher barely escaped assassination by the Irish Republican Army. She was in her hotel room when a bomb exploded, destroying the bathroom she had been in only moments earlier. Her would-be assassins left Mrs. Thatcher a chilling note that I've reflected on many times since. "We have only to be lucky once," they wrote to her. "You will have to be lucky always."

As quick as she was to criticize American diplomatic efforts vis-a-vis Syria, so quick she was also to agree with America's desire to retain its own sovereignty. The issue arose in discussions surrounding the 'Law of the Sea Treaty' which, if enacted, would have each signatory nation surrender its sovereign control over its borders, and instead allow an international tribunal to decide matters over each nation's coasts, waterways, and maritime boundaries. In 1982, Rumsfeld visited England to discuss the matter with Thatcher. He recalls:

A few days later I met with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher at 10 Downing Street in London. I explained my mission and Reagan's concerns. Quite briskly, Mrs. Thatcher bore right into the heart of the matter.

"Mr. Ambassador, if I understand correctly, what this Law of the Sea Treaty proposes is nothing less than the international nationalization of roughly two thirds of the Earth's surface," she began. "And you know how I feel about nationalization."

"I do indeed, Prime Minister," I responded. Mrs. Thatcher had made transferring nationalized businesses, from utilities to mining companies, back to the private sector a hallmark of her premiership.

She smiled. "Tell Ronnie I'm with him."

About the first Iraq War (1990/1991), Thatcher also had strong opinions. She saw that, if Saddam Hussein were allowed to retain power in Iraq, the root causes of the war would not have been addressed. She foresaw that leaving him in power necessitated a second such Gulf War. She urged the United States to press on in the war. America's stated goal in the war had been to liberate the oppressed nation of Kuwait, which had been invaded by Saddam Hussein's forces. The United States planned to stop after liberating Kuwait, and not to continue the war until Saddam's government fell. Rumsfeld writes:

Others I respected had a different view. While still Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher had famously warned President George H.W. Bush not to "go wobbly" after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. But the formidable Thatcher had been voted out of office before the war was concluded. She seemed unhappy with the result in Iraq. "There is the aggressor, Saddam Hussein, still in power," she later observed. Contrasting his fate to Bush's and hers, she noted, "There is the President of the United States, no longer in power. There is the Prime Minister of Britain, who did quite a lot to get things there, no longer in power. I wonder who won?"

A strong sense of justice guided Thatcher, whether it was returning the ownership of utilities and mining companies back to the people, or defending the rights of a sovereign nation to defend its own territory. Prior to Thatcher, the British government had followed a trend of nationalization. All kinds of businesses, from airlines to car companies and from railroads to telephone companies, had been taken over by the government. Ordinary people were not allowed to own such companies, nor were ordinary citizens allowed to make decisions about how such companies would be operated. When Thatcher was undoing such nationalization, she was transferring both ownership and decision-making authority back to the common people. Likewise, she saw no great complexity in the decision to defend British soil when the Argentines attacked the Falkland Islands. In 1982, the Argentines invaded the islands, which were recognized by all parties as belonging to the English. As she would say, almost ten years later about a different war, "When good has to be upheld, when evil has to be overcome, then Britain will take up arms!"

Like many wars in the last half of the twentieth century, and in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, it was an undeclared war. Neither the British Parliament nor the Argentine government officially declared war. Nonetheless, Thatcher was firm and decisive in her response to the unprovoked Argentine aggression. The British were somewhat disappointed that the United States did not eagerly and promptly join the English cause. Eventually, President Reagan did support the British war effort, but only after long deliberation. The Americans found the situation complex, given the Monroe Doctrine. But Argentina's attack was clearly a case of militaristic expansion and of firing on innocent and unaware civilians. George Will writes:

The Argentine junta learned of her decisiveness when it seized the Falklands. The British, too, learned. A Tory MP said, “She cannot see an institution without hitting it with her handbag.”

Thus the same vigor which she unleashed at the Argentine attackers was the same vigor which she unleashed at the economic regulations which were impoverishing the Britons.

Britain has periodically been a laboratory for economic ideas — those of Adam Smith, John Maynard Keynes, the socialism of postwar Labor. Before the ascendancy of Thatcher — a disciple of Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek — Tories tried to immunize Britain against socialism by administering prophylactic doses of the disease. But by 1979, Britain’s fundamental political arrangements were at issue: Such was the extortionate power of the unions to paralyze the nation that the writ of Parliament often seemed to run not beyond a few acres along the Thames.

Thatcher's first few months in office were bumpy. As she predicted, the transition to a free market, while bringing liberty and prosperity in the long run, would cause growth pains in the short run. Despite the short-term economic pains, the voters saw hope on the horizon, and reelected Thatcher.

In 1979, she won the most lopsided election since 1945, when there had not been an election for 10 years. In 1983, she became the first Tory since 1924 to win two consecutive elections. In 1987, she won a third. Her 12 consecutive years were an achievement without precedent since the 1832 Reform Act moved Britain, gingerly, toward mass democracy. The most consequential peacetime prime minister since Disraeli, by 1990 she had become the first prime minister to govern through an entire decade since the Earl of Liverpool from 1812 to 1827.

Having so many consecutive years in office, Thatcher was able to significantly change the course of England. The socialist habit of nationalizing industries, taxing people at continuously increasing rates, and taking economic decision-making away from ordinary citizens had been a British pattern in the decades after WWII. Thatcher would change that. Her goals were clear: reduce taxes, let people own businesses and operate them, and allow economic creativity to flourish unimpeded by governmental regulation. David Brooks writes:

Margaret Thatcher was a world historical figure for the obvious reasons. Before Thatcher, history seemed to be moving in the direction of Swedish social democracy. After Thatcher, it wasn’t. But her most pervasive influence was on the level of values.

She was formed by her disgust with 1970s Britain. She witnessed a moral shift in those years, away from people who were competitive and toward people who were cooperative, away from the ambitious and toward those who were self-nurturing and self-exploring, away from the culture of rectitude and toward the culture of narcissism. Especially in the prestigious reaches of society, people were often uninterested in technology and disdainful of commerce.

The tectonic shift which Thatcher wrought in British politics was so powerful that after her time as prime minister, both her party and the opposing party would see her views as axiomatic. It was not one of Thatcher's Tories, but an opponent from the Labor Party, Tony Blair, who would in many ways carry on both her domestic and foreign policy legacies.

Her political legacy may be so enduring because it is so foundational. It has not to do with the intricacies of policy, but rather with the goals and justifications of policy. Pragmatism can be, in some cases, a virtue; but it is never by itself a virtue. Rather, pragmatism is a virtue only in the service of some higher cause, like justice or charity. Justice may demand an armed response to Argentine attackers; justice may demand deregulation to lift citizens out of poverty and give them a fair chance at entering the middle class. Pragmatism is the tactic to justice's strategy. Pragmatism may ensure that the efforts on behalf of justice are effective. But a clear vision of justice is necessary. David Brooks continues:

In the political sphere this translated into an aversion to conflict, a desperate desire for consensus, which often translated into policy drift and a gradual surrender to entrenched interests. Thatcher saw this as a loss of national potency. She saw it as a loss of will, a settling for mediocrity, a betrayal of Britain’s great history and an acceptance of decline.

The daughter of a small grocer, she led a fervent bourgeois Risorgimento. She was the voice of the ambitious middle class. She lionized the self-made striver. Loving tidiness, she checked to see if the space above the picture frames was properly dusted.

She championed a certain sort of individual, one who possessed what the writer Shirley Robin Letwin called the Vigorous Virtues: “upright, self-sufficient, energetic, adventurous, independent-minded, loyal to friends and robust against foes.”

If her predecessors stood for consensus and the endless negotiation of interests over beer and sandwiches, Thatcher stood for steadfast conviction on behalf of the national good. An admirer of the free market, her companion goal was to restore the authority of the state, and she was willing to centralize power to do it.

At a time when others were sliding toward moral relativism, Thatcher stood for individual responsibility, moral self-confidence and often, it has to be admitted, self-righteous certitude.

Put aside her personal failings, she was a militant optimist for a country slipping unconsciously toward defeatism. Beyond her policy decisions, she was part of a values shift.

Today, bourgeois virtues like industry, competitiveness, ambition and personal responsibility are once again widely admired, by people of all political stripes. Today, technology is central to our world and tech moguls are celebrated.

Tony Blair and Bill Clinton embraced and ratified her policy shifts. Millions more have been influenced by her idea of what makes an admirable individual.

Margart Thatcher was guided by ideas, not by personalities. She enjoyed an excellent friendship with American presidents and diplomats, and yet was not hesitant about dissenting from American policies when her sense of justice demanded it. She was disappointed by Reagan's lack of instant enthusiasm for her war against Argentina; she was not enthusiastic about Reagan's military liberation of Grenada. She advocated shifting Cold War strategies to include defense in addition to offense: she supported America's development of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). Likewise, she was not swayed by the leaders of her own political party, with whom she sometimes disagreed. Indeed, it was her own party which finally turned her out of office, a departure which she made with grace, giving a final memorable speech in Parliament.

A Samurai's Identity Crisis

The Japanese social class appearing under the title ‘samurai’ has a long and complex history. Originally a warrior class, it eventually became a social class. This transition provoked a long-term identity crisis. The samurai were no longer needed as warriors, having been replaced by other military structures. While samurai were not fully accepted as aristocrats or nobles, they were also something more than the commoners. One samurai left an extensive memoir, giving us an insider’s view into the life of a samurai who is wrestling with the fact that he is born into a social class whose place in the community is ambiguous, a social class not fully accepted by either those above it or those below it.

Katsu Kokichi’s autobiography, Musui’s Story, gives the reader a concrete example of a samurai during the Tokugawa era. Katsu manifests, up-close, the effects his social status has on his daily life – a social status that was rapidly becoming, if it had not already become, an anachronism.

The samurai arose as a social class during the Kamakura era (1180 – 1333), although the roots of a military class certainly go back to earlier years. The process that led to the formalization of the samurai class is unclear in its earliest years. Historians entertain at least three distinct hypotheses about this earliest phase of a military social class. Significant is the fact that already in its infancy, there is some ambiguity about this group. Patricia Ebrey, Anne Walthall, and James Palais write:

The samurai plays such a central role in Japanese history from the twelfth to the nineteenth centuries that he appears almost timeless. Where he came from is a matter of debate.

If the origin of the group is ambiguous, its history is one of metamorphosis. Membership in this class was seen – by its own members and by the rest of society – as something being continually redesigned.

His connections with monarchy and court, and what it meant to be a samurai, changed over time. Historians once thought that the aristocracy reneged on its responsibility for maintaining peace early in the Heian period when it stopped executing criminals, allowed the conscript army to deteriorate, and permitted provincial governors to hire deputies rather than forsake the capital. By the tenth century, the countryside had fallen into disorder. Men in the provinces active in land reclamation projects armed themselves in local disputes and turned to warfare to protect their interests. A substantial warrior class arose, and in the twelfth century it turned on an effete and ineffectual monarchy.

A samurai’s self-concept was thus fraught with uncertainty. We see Musui wrestling to harmonize the inconsistent messages that he receives about his status. On the one hand, there is a Confucian sense about the necessity for honorable behavior, and the consequences for the lack of such honor: he reflects about “brave warriors who disregarded the laws of Heaven … and who came to grief.” On the other hand, the aristocracy views the samurai, who emerged from the lower classes, as not quite the equals of the nobles: internalizing the lower expectations placed on him, Musui recounts a drunken binge with no trace of shame, regret, or repentance. In such loutish behavior, Musui lives down to image projected by the upper classes onto the warrior class from which the samurai had emerged. As Ebrey, Walthall, and Palais write about the samurai:

They dressed in iron armor and animal skins rather than silk, and many were illiterate. In the eyes of the Kyoto aristocrats, they were rustic boors, hardly more civilized than the Emishi they were called to fight.

Yet the samurai also saw themselves, and others saw them, as being above other social classes:

The verb samurau means to serve; the first samurai were warriors who held the sixth court rank along with scholars, scribes, and artisans. Other terms for fighting men did not carry the connotation of service to the court. By acquiring court rank and offices, such as guard at the left gate, samurai distinguished themselves from commoners. Warriors either sought rank themselves or accepted the leadership of someone who did. When royal scions or Fujiwara descendants moved to the provinces in search of careers that eluded them at court, their qualifications for rank based on their distinguished lineage helped them attract followers. In political terms, the need to have success at arms legitimized by court approbation, rank, and title always limited warrior autonomy.

Accordingly, as Musui recounts his activities as fundraiser for a temple, he speaks of recruiting ‘merchants’ and ‘peasants’ in way that indicates that they are not of the same class as ‘my fellow swordsmen.’

Given this equivocation about his niche in society, in Musui’s daily life, activities that hint of an aristocratic life of leisure, like practicing fencing in his spare time, alternate with more practical pursuits hinting of a more direct interest in sustenance. He writes:

I now had to earn pocket money. I tore around doing favors for people and racked my brain thinking up moneymaking schemes.

Musui is living in a social structure that emerged centuries earlier. Between the Kamakura era in which the samurai were first clearly categorized as a class distinct from warriors in general, and the Tokugawa era in which Musui lives, Japanese society continued to modify the social status of the samurai. Ebrey, Walthall, and Palais write that, in 1588, Hideyoshi

tried to insist on a rigid status distinction between samurai and commoners by forbidding all but samurai from wearing two swords, one long and one short. Thereafter, commoners might own swords, but they could not put them on display. Hideyoshi issued a series of decrees prohibiting samurai from leaving their lord’s service to become merchants or cultivators and preventing farmers from deserting their fields to become city folk. Although it proved impossible to make clear distinctions between various statuses and some domains such as Satsuma or Tosa continued to recognize rustic samurai (goshi), Hideyoshi’s intent remained the law of the land until 1871.

Although this move was intended to elevate the social status of samurai, and seems to have done so to some extent, it also left it with its original ambiguity, and added a second layer of ambiguity because the very fact of social change creates ambiguity. This uncertainty would affect both the values which the samurai internalized, and the values which they exemplified to those around them – i.e., the values which society at large imputed to them.

So we see Musui remind his brother, in a heated moment in which they nearly come to blows, that he, too, is “an honorable retainer of the shogun.” What is Musui’s concept of ‘honor’ – what are his values? Again, with no remorse or chagrin, he reports that he spent his “days carousing to” his heart’s content, and that

I had some bills at the brothels, but instead of paying them, I got hold of six ryo and invited Masanosuke and one of his father’s retainers to the Yoshiwara.

Even if the reader makes allowances for the possibility of different sexual ethics – although Musui’s behavior might be vulgar even by those standards – his choice to squander money in the ‘red light district’ when he has financial obligations still violates the sense of honor which we can reasonably attribute to the Tokugawa society. Musui has, then, a nominal honor by virtue of his birth into the samurai class, but he visibly fails to embody the ethics associated with this honor.

The larger Tokugawa culture, in which Musui and his fellow samurai of the 1800’s found themselves, was characterized largely by consumerism and advancing education.

Consumerism typifies especially the urban areas – Musui’s Edo is modern Tokyo. The city had large shopping districts, a wide variety of products available, and specialization in professions (e.g., an emerging class of lawyers). A “fixed price system for cash” began to be more common, and commercials were incorporated into theatrical plays. Celebrities endorsed products, and enterprising showmen developed products named after themselves, engineering product placements in their own stage dramas, and featuring them in woodblock prints – an early form of junk mail. Edo hosted a high degree of commercialization and consumerist culture – all by the year 1800, before Musui was born.

Tokugawa’s popular culture enjoyed a high literacy rate. A strong educational system was in place, allowing for study of Confucian and Buddhist classics for the aristocrats; but for the masses, the chief significance of this educational boom was the ability to read, along with abilities in mathematics. Written materials fueled the front end of this consumer society – the ‘user interface’ – and calculation powered the other side, both in terms of financial accounting and ‘product design.’ The fact that we can use these startlingly anachronistic terms reveals exactly how modern Tokugawa society had become – and with that modernization, how far removed the medieval origins of the samurai class appeared to that society. The samurai seemed like something that didn’t quite belong.

Musui found a way to adapt. He engages in the Edo economy: he “went about learning to appraise swords.” Appraisal is recognized as a specific and distinct professional skill, a sign of a developed economy. Later applying this skill, Musui enters into the world of entrepreneurship and the startup of a small business:

I also had to make ends meet, so I tried my hand at dealing in swords and other military accoutrements. In the beginning I lost money – fifty or sixty ryo the first month and a half – but I got used to the business little by little, and by attending the second-hand goods market every night, I found I could really bring in profits.

Musui has become integrated into the commercialized Tokugawa urban culture. Likewise, he is a product of its higher levels of education. Reading and writing letters is a regular feature of the narrative, and the business transactions into which he enters require proficiency in calculation.

Musui’s life in the context of the larger Tokugawa culture is colored by an ambivalence about his place in society as a samurai. This equivocation manifests itself in his everyday life: a mixture of aristocratic leisure and middle class concerns for income. It manifests itself in his self-contradictory values and ethics, which have added aristocratic rhetoric about honor as a veneer over the original coarse behavior of the warrior class. And it makes the entire samurai class, this inconsistent mix of oafish soldiers with titled airs, an anachronism as its individual members try to navigate their way in the waters of an educated consumerist society.