Mourning Thatcher in Estonia

An Estonian Public Broadcasting news article about the death of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher noted her efforts to help Estonia’s early independent government break with Soviet-era policies. It also included the following:

Of the three, it was Thatcher’s economic policies in particular that were often cited by Mart Laar, the country’s prime minister who came to power after the first post-independence parliamentary elections, as the blueprint for his free-market reforms.

In 2010, Laar told the Freakonomics Radio podcast: “The flat tax I got on my first meeting with Margaret Thatcher, who I admired very much and who was a great admirer of Milton Friedman. I met her first when I had been prime minister I think for some months and so on, and when I told her what I am planning to do, she looked at me with these big eyes and said ‘you are one brave young man.’ And then a little bit introduced me on the realities of the Western world on which I was not very well informed. But I didn’t stop.”

Freakonomics podcast listeners may recall that Laar appeared on one of our earliest podcasts “What Would the World Look Like if Economists Were in Charge?“