I would also point out that even if (which is not admitted) any of what rarelamb says is properly founded, he makes the same fundamental mistake as one of the ones that Thatcher made and even later admitted - the evaluation of wellbeing only in cash terms, and the failure to value for example proper health care provision but also many other things - of which justice might be but one other thing.

I would also point out that the economic values described above do not include the values - not even the money values - of the provisions (excluding cash) properly provided by the welfare state.

Finally, for this post, the assertion that Thatcherism made even the poorest in society richer in bald economic terms is still untenable, for the statistics above rely on measuring the incomes of cohorts of finite size, and within the poorest cohort there are many who failed to do as well as the average of the cohort. By choosing smaller cohorts, the contrary can obviously be shown.