Cavuto: Lessons from the life of Margaret Thatcher

By now you know Maggie Thatcher is physically gone. She leaves a Europe whose leaders appear long gone.

No backbone. No courage. No clue.

You don't have to be on the left or the right to see among the crop of global heads of state that something is very wrong.

Governments have gotten too big and the bills to pay for those governments have come due. And they simply don't know how to pay. So many just punt -- preferring talk of shared sacrifice, but never really sacrificing for fear of sacrificing their jobs in the process.

I think it was another great British leader who admitted to his people that all he had to offer them was "blood, toil, tears and sweat."

Winston Churchill telling an already war-weary Britain, "You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: victory." Decades later, Maggie Thatcher offered much the same to an inflation-ravaged, economically ruined Britain: Much pain but from which, much to gain.

It's hard to imagine now what the so-called "Iron Lady" was facing then and what she had to face down then.

Union workers who wouldn't accept her cuts, so they went on strike. From sanitation workers who called her garbage and let it pile up in the streets to college professors who called her worse and burned her in effigy in British parks.

Her own Cabinet questioned her, some turned on her -- all fearful of losing their precious political jobs because of her and her refusal to go slow on those cuts or to give in on those cuts. There is no good time to go after government excess, she once said. There will only be bad times if we continue with government excess.

There's an old expression, the cure can be worse than the disease. Europe is now in the fix it's in because it cannot distinguish between the cure and the disease. So it is always sick and getting sicker. Resigned to the blatherings of gutless leaders whose lack of a backbone gets only scarier.

It wasn't just that Maggie Thatcher stuck to her guns, she stuck to her principles and the result was a stronger, more vibrant Britain. Makes you wonder if the crop of leaders today showed remotely the same resolve the result would be a stronger, more vibrant world.

That's the real drag remembering Mag. It's not that there are no more "Iron Ladies." There are no more Iron... anyones.