ABSTRACT
In his State of the Union Address opening the year 1998, President William Jefferson Clinton saw a solution to the "sterile debate between government is the enemy and government is the answer". At issue was the problem of achieving a proper balance between "public investment" expenditure for the immediate common goods, as against "sound public finance", the maintenance of balanced budget for the long-run common good. Margaret Thatcher's grandest objective was the correction: end socialism. She wanted a "property-owning democracy", the property including capital shares. Using the word "privatization", on July 1, 1981, she privatized forty state-owned concerns, including British Airways, British Steel, British Gas, and British Petroleum. Thatcher's powerful purposefulness led her perhaps too far. While thrashing Labor and socialism so thoroughly, she abraded conservative skins as well and, like the great de Gaulle, made herself superfluous. Nixon also showed great skill in Vietnam.
