Admirers and detractors of Margaret Thatcher can agree that she will be remembered as one of the key political architects of our times. Along with her soulmate, U.S. President Ronald Reagan, she broke decisively with the post-war Keynesian welfare state and ushered in the still-enduring age of neo-liberalism.

Lady Thatcher and her key advisers, such as Keith Joseph, were intellectually grounded in the work of the most prominent foe of John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich Hayek, and his American disciple, Milton Friedman. Her government explicitly set out to reverse the post-war growth in the economic and social role of democratic government, and to thereby restore business profitability and "confidence."

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Congratulations to Statistics Canada for providing an update on top incomes in Canada, and for launching two new CANSIM tables allowing researchers to dig into the details.

While the income share of the top 1 per cent has slipped slightly since the Great Recession -- likely due in large part to the reduced value of exercised stock options -- their share of all income (10.6 per cent in 2010) still stands well above the low of about 7 per cent that was reached in the early 1980s.

Leader of the Opposition Tom Mulcair gave a fine speech on the budget bill on October 24, which can be found in its entirety in Hansard.

I have posted some extracts of interest to progressive economists below. They echo many of the arguments made on this blog.

In the spirit of "know thy enemy," I recently read Hayek's The Road to Serfdom. (Note to the anxious -- I survived the experience, and remain a convinced left Keynesian democratic socialist.)

Hayek is, of course, the totemic figure of neoliberalism who fought Keynes and Keynesian economics in the 1930s and is the intellectual figurehead of today's "austerians"; the political theorist who, the right-wing mythologizers tell us, kept the  torch of market freedom alive during the dark days of post-war managed capitalism; the intellectual guru of Milton Friedman, Chicago school economics, and Alan Greenspan.