I am a Liberal. Something I perhaps would never had said a year ago. But of course, because the Left has hijacked this term I now must clarify. I am a classical liberal.
So how did the Left hijack this term? During the great depression when FDR ran rampant with his "New Deal" taxation and regulation, those who opposed these almost always unconstitutional legislation ended up labeled as "Conservative". Conservative at this time was somewhat in the true sense of the term meaning conserving the past government structure. The supporters of the New Deal legislation gave themselves the label of "Liberals", but of course they we the ones fighting for freedom from poverty (as if this were a right). The terms stuck and have to this day.
Of course the classical term "liberal" (with its root word- liberty) means one who promotes liberty for the individual. The actual (classical) liberals that got branded Conservative lost their identity in the true fight for liberty. The FDR era has done so much to re-write history, even long before its era began. Now current liberals on the left constantly try to remove themselves from progressive history which was full of racism and elitist tyrannical progression and align themselves with the classical liberal. The contradictions between the classical liberal and today's modern liberal are glaring and smack you in the face, yet this doesn't stop them from trying to associate themselves with the founding and the true freedom advocates throughout history. The modern liberal claims you should be free from the tyranny of need. Sounds good on the surface. After all, how free can you be if you have no food and no home? But dive into what that actually means - to be free from need. How does one (the state or elitists) free someone from need? Do they just give them what they need from thin air? of course not. Do they figure out how to produce these things that would full fill the needs of people and then make sure they have them? Of course not. They take from the ones who have and give to the ones that don't. Well if you happen to be one of those people who have, hows your freedom? You're not asking to be free from want or need, your just asking to be left alone. You want real freedom, just stop stealing from me!
The true meaning of liberty is to be free from the whims and wants of other men! So to define liberty as being free from need would be to say liberty means those that don't need must supply. Is that liberty? Or is liberty actually having the right to own your own body, production, and property? I say its the latter. The Left sees that wealth and economics is a zero sum gain, meaning there is a finite amount of wealth and no more can be created. Thus if someone is rich, it means someone else must be poor. Of course the actual science of economics shows this just isn't true. Wealth is unlimited. Wealth creation comes from technology and capital.
I will explain the difference on a simple example of how the left and classical liberals understand wealth. Lets say 10 men live on an island and on this island is unlimited berries to eat. Each man needs to eat 100 berries a day to sustain himself. Each man can pick 10 berries per hour. So each man works 10 hours a day picking berries and has 14 hours of leisure to do what he wants. We will call the leisure time (14 hours per day) the mans wealth. More leisure, then more wealth to each man. One man figures out if he carves a stick a certain way then he can use it to pick 20 berry's per hour instead of 10. But he will need 10 hours to make the stick just so. So the man must for go some leisure time to make this stick. but once he gives up these 10 hours of his leisure time he now gets an extra 5 hours a day leisure. Or he can continue working 10 hours and trade the extra berries to someone else for something. This stick is what is referred to as "capital". Of course the other men can copy him and the "technology" of the stick will spread. Eventually each man has 19 hours per day leisure instead of 14.
Now with the extra time man can continue to invent better sticks or start making housing or whatever. There is no limit to wealth creation through technology and capital advances. But it is the Capital and technology that create the wealth. The Left doesn't see it this way. They don't understand capital and technology advances overall wealth. Even if the first man was the only one who knew how to make the stick so he had control over it and would not share the know-how, he still makes everyone more wealthy.
Let's assume this scenario is true, and one man controls the stick technology. He agrees to make everyone a stick, but they must give him 90% of the extra production. All the men still have more berries in 10 hours than they did before (or can make the same berries in less time), and the one stick making man has more berries than he can eat. Those extra berries are nothing unless the other men forgo collecting their total daily berry needs and do something else for the stick inventor. Maybe he wants them to rub his feet. The men would rather pick berries than rub his feet. Unless he trades 5 hours of berriesbecause they didn't all get more wealthy at exactly the same way and same amount, the Left doesn't think its fair. It is fair, the guy who was smart enough to invent the berry stick got the most wealthy, but even though he made everyone more wealthy through his invention, it is still not good enough for the Left.
The Left claims they are for liberty because some men will want what the stick inventor has. The end result is they have stopped people from making the sticks because they actually stole the stick makers liberty or right to his own production, property and body. Wealth is not a zero sum gain. In real world economics, the rich make others richer. Individual liberty is the key to this and the free market system is the means. Relatively speaking, the poor in the United States are far wealthier than other nations. This is not due to socialists policies of stealing the liberty from the rich. It is due to the same phenomenon that is described on berry island. When government regulation is applied to attempt to make free market better, it always widens the gap between the rich and poor. As on Berry island, in a total free market economy the wealth will be disperse and unleveled. The unleveled amount gets elevated by regulation which disturbs market price signals. (For more info, read Austrian economics). Regulation is always a removal of some persons liberty usually tipping the advantage to the already wealthy.
I am a Liberal. I am for individual liberty. It is the individual that invents the technology and capital that increase our wealth, not the collective. When ever you increase liberty for the collective, you must by definition, remove liberty for the individual. The opposite is not true. Increasing the liberty of the individual does not reduce liberty for the collective. It increases it as well. Once you have accepted this fact, you can move on to being a true LIBERAL.
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