Contrary to what John Cachia said (December 9), the core value of Thatcherism was a return to old-fashioned thrift, where you did not spend what you had not earned and you did not continue borrowing to continue spending.
Like all left wing economists and philosophers, Mr Cachia's ideal state of affairs is consuming what others have toiled to earn. This is the essence of socialism and, to make it work, you have to convince its victims that the creation of a "Robin Hood state", that robs Peter to pay Paul, is the greatest act of human compassion.
The 364 academic economists, and Sir Ian Gilmour (labelled "wets" by Margaret Thatcher's think-tank), that Mr Cachia mentions, and many of whom wrote too soon about how Mrs Thatcher's reforms would fail to generate a recovery, were eventually unequivocally proven wrong.
Mrs Thatcher inherited a totally failed economy and demoralised ex-mother of Empire, riddled with industrial strife and run by union leaders rather than parliament.
Socialist Labour administrations, in spite of their cosy relationship with unions, had not created industrial peace but, on the contrary, had reduced this former home of the industrial revolution to such a pathetic state that Labour finance minister Dennis Healey had to beg the International Monetary Fund for a cash injection into his empty coffers when the highest rate of British income tax was over 90 per cent and had been forcing entrepreneurial wealth creators to emigrate.
This was the height of post-war socialist achievement in Britain and the catch phrase then was "profits are evil" (and the state should therefore relieve you of them!).
Intellectual left wingers, so fashionable in the British 1970s scene, predicted that America's capitalist easy hire and fire employment rules were leading up to an unemployment and social injustice time-bomb of catastrophic proportions.
By the late 1990s, America and Thatcherism-revitalised Britain had proven socialist doctrine totally false. Mrs Thatcher's think-tank brought down Britain's top rate of income tax to 40 per cent and American-style easy hire and fire legislation eventually helped produce some of the lowest unemployment rates seen in western Europe.
Furthermore, some eminent American economists have always argued that an income tax rate higher than 25 per cent would eventually harm the entrepreneurial dynamo driving a wealth-creating capitalist system.
Information leaked to newspapers claimed that economist Patrick Minford had suggested to other members of Mrs Thatcher's right wing think-tank that if big items of state funding, such as education and health, were privatised, income tax and national insurance could be abolished, leaving citizens, according to Prof. Minford, free to choose and pay for services they wanted, rather than being offered what the state decided their money should buy.
However, the rest of the think-tank, headed by Keith Joseph, decided against Prof. Minford's draconian suggestions but were impressed by his figures predicting terrifyingly high levels of future taxation (for example, 25 per cent employees' NI contribution this century) if the welfare state was not cut back.
It is interesting to note that the British university vice-chancellors that had joined the chorus of Sir Ian and 364 academic economists critical of the introduction of university tuition fees and student bank loans repayable after qualification, have now supported Tony Blair's present Labour government plans to raise university tuition fees rather than abolish them!
Mr Blair has been the most successful post-war Labour prime minister because he inherited a Thatcherism-rejuvenated vigorous economy which he built on, making most of Mrs Thatcher's policies his own and leaving the Conservatives with little more policy choice than an anti-EU stance.
Mr Cachia states that there has never been, in any of the four corners of the globe, such a thing as a private shipbuilding/dockyard. So what were Bailey and Swann Hunter who were brought in to convert our dockyard from a military to a commercial one? Not only dockyards, but even whole harbours were sold to private entrepreneurs in Mrs Thatcher's abolition of subsidies reforms.
I distinctly remember one shipbuilding dockyard was closed after a French firm, that was considering buying it, eventually decided against the purchase; this dockyard was a British news item day in day out for a few weeks before its fate was decided by lack of a buyer.
Mr Cachia shoots from the hip again when he contradicts what I stated about the Thatcher reforms in the national health service (NHS).
This was financially capped, hospitals had to price all their services and family doctors could only use a certain amount of hospital services for their patients according to their allocated budget.
Instead of making a case for a larger budget every year, hospital departmental directors were instructed to, say, achieve 10 per cent more service throughput for one per cent less budget allocation. This happened for a few successive years.
Directors also had to make redundant nursing or laboratory scientific personnel where overstaffing was identified. This was carried out by abolishing a post simply by changing its nomenclature, advising its holder that he/she had to apply for the new post advertised and then he/she would fail an interview for the newly created post.
I can assure Mr Cachia I know what I am talking about, having been a management board director of Winchester & Eastleigh Health Care Trust during the early 1990s' NHS reforms.
He will also be interested to learn that Mr Blair's Labour government will now be imposing a market system on the NHS, in which all state hospitals will have to reveal the cost of surgery and compete with private hospitals for the custom of every patient, that is, an NHS patient will be able to choose to go to a private hospital if it can match the NHS hospital price.
Mrs Thatcher's conversion of council rates to poll tax was obviously a tactical mistake. Rates was an annual council tax on property capital value; abolishing this in favour of a tax on every household member was meant to bring in more money from government council housing.
Serious popular unrest brought the end of poll tax and the reintroduction of annual council tax on property and council housing tenants were encouraged to buy their rented accommodation and become property owners.
Mr Cachia is wrong again when he ascribes Mrs Thatcher's removal from No.10 to the poll tax blunder. She was anti-EU and when her two most senior ministers, Nigel Lawson and Geoffrey Howe, resigned in protest at her anti-European stance during an important EU summit meeting chaired by Guglio Andreotti, she was removed from party leader and from No. 10. The British Conservative Party is still blighted by its succession of Eurosceptic leaders, to the delight of Mr Blair's Labour government.
Some form of annual council tax on property probably exists in all developed countries. Such a tax would shock most Maltese but it does have a lot going for it. In recent years, all forms of Maltese investment income and capital appreciation has been taxed while the biggest Maltese investment (bricks and mortar) is not subject to an annual council tax.
In Britain, the council tax pays for all local state schools, including teachers' salaries, local police services, street lighting, road maintenance, garbage collection, etc. This tax, paid to councils by property owners, therefore prevents further escalation of central government income tax and VAT.
Having experienced it in Britain, I feel the council tax is fairer than escalating VAT or income tax. Nobody can evade it, and it is a tax on property wealth rather than on people's efforts to earn a living.
It is indeed possible to have mangia e passeggia individuals, with considerable property assets, paying far less income tax than much less well-off people working flat-out to maintain a household in reasonable comfort.
We have just experienced alternative forms of taxation in the shape of a 20 per cent VAT increase. This consumption tax, applied across the board on most services, hits far worse the less well-off than it does the seriously rich.
The Maltese nation is somewhat stunned because, within living memory, we have gone from most self-employed paying hardly any tax to taxation of all forms of economic activity, investment income and capital appreciation (but no council tax on property and no annual household sewage service fee).
We can only expect more taxation if the welfare state continues to grow instead of being cut back, at least with means testing. The shipbuilding/drydocks complex has also been added to the welfare state burden, like the Mater Dei Hospital.
A commercial lawyer friend, who claims to have seen the Mater Dei building contract, insists that the builder is not legally bound to a specific cost, nor to completion time!
So long as we permit politicians to use the welfare state and claims of social justice based on middle and senior management civil service low wage structures, in exchange for votes (and their related administrative power, perks and VIP pension), we are in for more taxation of the working man's efforts and a slowing of the economy.
Furthermore, a country whose citizens start believing they have discovered the eternal wheel of prosperity by simply selling each other houses, rather than increasing sales of services and goods to foreigners, and continue expanding welfare state consumption, will be heading for the rocks.