“What’s wrong with politics?”

Baroness Thatcher’s lecture to the Conservative Political Centre, 11th October 1968.

http://www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument.asp?docid=101632

Doubtless there will be accusers that we are only interested in more money. This just is not so. Money is not an end in itself. It enables one to live the kind of life of one’s own choosing. Some will prefer to put a large amount to raising material standards, others will pursue music, the arts, the cultures, others will use their money to help those here and overseas about whose needs they feel strongly and do not let us underestimate the amount of hard earned cash that this nation gives voluntarily to worthy causes. The point is that even the Good Samaritan had to have the money to help, otherwise he too would have had to pass on the other side. In choice of way of life J. S. Mill’s views are as relevant as ever.

‘The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way so long as we do not deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it … Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest.’

These policies have one further important implication. Together they succeed at the same time in giving people a measure of independence from the state—and who wants a people dependent on the state and turning to the state for their every need—also they succeed in drawing power away from governments and diffusing it more widely among people and non-governmented institutions.