What do all the labels mean?
Presently the term "liberalism" is a generic description of a preference of government-run solutions to problems, real and contrived. Government-run health care, for example, is the solution to health care costs and inefficiencies. Government is the primary answer to most any question of policy and social issues. Liberal policies, therefore, are those that place primary importance of government power, government growth, and government involvement in more and more of the lives of Americans.
This wasn't always what a good liberal preferred.
“Classical Liberalism” was a movement of the 18th and early 19th centuries that stressed the primacy of the individual over the state and individual rights secured through limiting the power of government. Competitive free market capitalism and free international trade was the economical fruition of this thought, acknowledging that social welfare and advances in living standards come from freedom in the marketplace, not the dictates of central governments. Furthermore, international peace, it was argued, was more probable through free trade among peoples of respective nations, therefore punitive tariffs damaged whatever degree of both domestic and international tranquility that could otherwise be attained in an imperfect world.
The Founding Fathers are widely viewed as classic liberals. The Constitution, with its limitations on government powers and protections of individual rights, fits the description quite well. Also, the Declaration of Independence, our founding document, states in assertively plain terms a clearly classically liberal view of man, government, and justice. Jefferson’s Declaration—with its insistence that governments derive their legitimate powers from the consent of the people—reads like a footnote to John Locke’s Second Treatise, is another lodestar of classic liberalism.
The term, liberal in today’s sense means the opposite of what it originally meant. Modern defenders and apologists for classical liberalism such as Milton Friedman refused to relinquish the title liberal. From Capitalism and Freedom
:"In the name of welfare and equality, the twentieth-century liberal has come to favor a revival of the very policies of state intervention and paternalism against which classical liberalism fought. In the very act of turning the clock back to seventeenth-century mercantilism, he is fond of castigating true liberals as reactionary!" [Emphasis added.]
Ludwig Von Mises, in the introduction to the English version of his book, Liberalism: The Classical Tradition
, explains that liberalism today means the opposite of the liberalism he is setting forth to defend:"In England the term 'liberal' is mostly used to signify a program that only in details differs from the totalitarianism of the socialists. In the United States 'liberal' means today a set of ideas and political postulates that in every regard are the opposite of all that liberalism meant to the preceding generations."
So here comes the skull cramp: Roundly speaking, people today identified with "conservatism" are actually trying to conserve liberalism. Conserve liberalism, there you go.
Today’s conservatives believe, generally, in the primacy of the individual, individual freedom, and free markets. They are suspicious of government activities beyond national defense and the judicial system, and stress the importance of constitutional limits on government power.
Today’s liberals believe in further government intrusion in the market place, in the affairs of our lives, believe elites in powerful positions are better equipped to order society and our lives than individuals bandying about, willy nilly, in an unplanned free market environment.
How did the term "liberal" come to be interchanged with the opposite of its true meaning?
Discussing that question helps us understand much of the political rhetoric that fills the news. And that we will save for the next Chalk Talk.
And then there are the terms "progressive" and "libertarian"...
