During her term as Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher broke Britain’s unions and ‘off-shored’ basic industries under the guise of laissez-faire economic policy. While this video is specific to the British coal mining industry, the story has been repeating throughout the western world over the past 30 years – domestic industries and jobs are moved overseas without regard for those left behind. The remaining economy becomes one based on finance and consumption, rather than production, and wealth disparity, rather than equality.

While the owners of capital benefit from cheaper foreign labor, can hollowing out a country’s core industries and destroying the domestic middle and working classes really lead to greater prosperity? For 30 years the middle and working classes (i.e. labor) around the Western world maintained a semblance of wealth by using credit to fill the gaps created by declining real incomes and shrinking savings. But in 2008, 30 years of twisted laissez-faire policies supplemented by debt finally blew up, culminating the labor class crisis.

Since then, millions of American families have walked away from their homes to live in conditions unthinkable five years ago. Over 46 million Americans are currently using food stamps – a 170% increase over the past decade. 2011 alone saw the Arab Spring, Occupy Everything and UK riots – rebellions sparked by relatively innocuous events but fanned by decades of rising inequality and hopelessness. In flauntingly stark contrast, 2010 Wall Street pay packages hit a new record of $135 billion (Source: WSJ).

Like the mining families in the video, anger is growing as people worldwide begin to realize they are getting screwed. Yet, the destruction of the Western world’s middle class is not complete.

Worse than Thatcherism in totality is Thatcherism in partiality. The deregulation of the banking industry, which started in the late 1970s, was simply a facade for a ‘heads I win, tails you lose’ system. Bank deregulation was highly profitable for the banking industry, with the unfortunate side-effect of increased systemic risk. Since crises of systemic proportions are extremely painful, the banking industry has repeatedly been bailed out over the past three decades, only to increase the moral hazard in the system. So much for laissez-faire.

Bank deregulation contributed to, if not created, the 2008 economic near-collapse. Alas, in 2008/2009 the banking system again had its losses socialized. Unfortunately, this crisis was of epic scale and the money required to keep the system afloat was unimaginably large. Now it is time to pay the bill, and most of the world’s leaders are on the austerity trail. As benefits are cut and taxes raised, it will ultimately be the average laborer that again pays for the perverted laissez-faire policies of the past.

(Video no longer available.)