Since the death of Margaret Thatcher, we have heard the two extremes: she was a laissez-faire monster, and she was a laissez-faire hero. I am inclined in the direction of this column by Justin Raimondo, which is more on the negative side: the Thatcher record, like the Reagan record, is less impressive than the legends of right and left would have it, and in some areas — civil liberties, and Thatcher’s endorsement, even after her retirement, of neocon foreign policy in the U.S. — was downright bad. There are some pluses: even though, with both Reagan and Thatcher, the free-market program was sometimes more rhetorical than real, pro-market rhetoric was better than nothing, especially in the late 1970s. And both of them stood up to the coercive unions, and hastened their demise.