From “Liberalism: History and Future”:

And so the question arises: How did liberalism transform, moving to our American context, from a term denoting a policy of Jeffersonian domestic freedom and Washingtonian foreign nonentanglement into a synonym for what has been called the “welfare-warfare state”? How did a “liberal” go from being an advocate of limited government to being one of expansive statism? Was this change substantive or semantic, i.e., an example of ideological evolution or an act of terminological theft? Proponents of the latter theory included the economist Joseph Schumpeter, who quipped, “As a supreme, if unintended, compliment, the enemies of private enterprise have thought it wise to appropriate its label.” That the “new” liberalism was in many ways part of the collectivist reaction against the old was not something that these “enemies” would (or even could) outright deny. Indeed, in 1934 The Nation opined that “the New Deal in the United States, the new forms of economic organization in Germany and Italy, and the planned economy of the Soviet Union” were all strands of the trend “for nations and groups … [to] demand a larger measure of security than can be provided by a system of free enterprise.” Even earlier, John Dewey stated that the “reconstruction” of society by the American electorate “would signify that we had entered constructively and voluntarily upon the road which Soviet Russia is traveling with so much attendant destruction and coercion.” And yet he called himself not a Marxist but a liberal — a “new” liberal — and his ideas not collectivism but individualism — a “new” individualism. Evidently this terminology served double duty by separating American statism from the tyrannies of its European counterparts and associating it with the glories of our Western and Revolutionary heritage. “Liberalism” was the proverbial velvet glove.

There are two more points to be made for the case for label-theft. One is that, in contrast to the Anglo-American world, the term largely retains its meaning on the Continent, where a “liberal” is still one who is pro-laissez faire. It would be a difficult task indeed to promote welfarism as “new” in a land where “poor laws” go all the way back to Rome. The other is the simple fact that the term really never lost its original meaning completely. When we speak of the U.S. or the U.K. or even Sweden as a “liberal” democracy, the term refers to the large measure of political freedom and private property that still constitutes the base of each nation, not to the overlaying socialistic programs that burden that base.

The contention that the change in liberalism’s meaning represents a change in liberal thought is always made in reference to a single thinker: John Stuart Mill. Contrary to a popular impression, Mill never adopted socialism and actually grew more critical of it (cf. his unfinished Chapters on Socialism). His real break with (rather than “development of”) liberal theory was the proposition that the distribution of wealth, unlike its production, was not subject to natural economic laws or property rights: “The things once there, mankind … can do with them as they like.” The resulting formula — private production but political redistribution — is easily recognizable as the contemporary Anglo-American model. In 1905, legal scholar A. V. Dicey taught that Mill’s dissent was “in England, to a great extent, the cause of the transition from … individualism … to … collectivism. His teaching specially affected the men who were just entering public life towards 1870. It prepared them at any rate to accept, if not to welcome, the collecti[vism] which from that time onwards has gained increasing strength.” Eventually, those disciples of that collectivism (such as L. T. Hobhouse) who opposed Fabian imperialism and Shavian authoritarianism would point to Mill and claim their own collectivism to be the scion of liberal ancestry — which seems to bring us back around to the velvet glove.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE.

Everyone likes freedom–for themselves. It’s all those other people having freedom that they worry about. Isn’t government power built upon this fear, crisis, hysteria? Fear of crime, fear of disease, fear of the economy, fear of war, etc. Ironically, the more power people grant government to be protected from these fears, the more likely these fears are to come true, instead of what they expect.

Great read, as usual.

Undoing Socialism
Thursday, May 28, 2009

Is Socialism Really The Same As The Neocon Right?

As is no surprise, the neocon thought of both of the political parties that serve the unConstitutional coup are on the ‘right.’ Every repulsion associated with the ‘right’ is due to the coercive nature of its stance, regardless of which issue it is addressing.

It is also no surprise that the unConstitutional coup is statist and anti-liberalism. It is oppressive and ego-driven.

In the real world all ego-driven interpretation and all ego-driven interventionism is without moral authority and is destined to fail as long as the human spirit is destined to exist.

May I just say that this article was just plainly well written.

I agree with DixieFlatline. Left? Right? Who cares? Spangler is making distinctions in an empty void. He is dividing air. Perhaps he just didn’t have much to say that day.

The message in this article is that political labels are deceptive if you are trying to discern a position.

Cheers

The left/right thing is a great waste of time and diversion from the real task of resisting the police state.
I agree with Freedom-Force.com’s Ed Griffin that there are only Collectivists and Individualists with a smattering of Anarchists in society.
It doesn’t matter their preferred label, it’s what they do that matters. I’m a libertarian, I act as an individual and co-operate with others on a voluntary basis.

Right from 1789 (the year of the Revolution) the French Revolutionary government issued fiat money Assignats – supposedly “backed” by land stolen by this regime from the Roman Catholic Church and others.

And philisophically the Jacobins and others held (with the late Rousseau) that there should be no associations outside of politics – that everything was poltical and the only acceptable associations were progressive seeking to establish enlightened statism.

Sure Bastiat sat on the left hand side of the National Assemby (decades later) – but most of the people sitting around him were socialists of one sort or another.

Sorry but the “once the left were free market” line is just not true. Sure they use the words “freedom” and “liberty” at lot – but when one looks in detail their line of policy was about expanding government not reducing it.

This is also true in the case of the United States and Britain – libertarians praise Thomas Paine and J.S. Mill to the sky. But the people who praise these thinkers look at the fine sounding words they came out with – not their actual policies.

‘They were pledged to… to remove the government-guaranteed special privileges of guilds, unions, and associations whose members were banded together to use the law to set the price of their labor or capital or product above what it would be in a free market…The rightists or “reactionaries” stood for a highly centralized national government, special laws and privileges for unions and various other groups and classes…’ [emphasis added].

There were no such privileges for unions in those days, and in fact unions hardly existed at all. By the time it was different, it wasn’t the first leftists any more either.

“The ideals of the party of the Left were based largely on the spirit and principles of our own American Constitution”.

That’s wrong. It is certainly true that there was a lot they shared – but the flow of ideas and influence went the other way, from certain elements in Europe to the American colonies. Even Locke often got there via the over-simplifications of French philosophes like Helvetius. It was just that ignition happened earlier in America, not that the fuel came from there.

“Those who hold the power always claim that they use it for the people, whether the form of government is a kingdom, a dictatorship, a democracy, or whatever”.

That’s wrong, too. It’s a fair observation about modern times, but it certainly isn’t true of the Divine Right of Kings, the Ottomans and other theocratic stuff, or of many colonial systems (the French, Belgians and British, and even the Germans, talked the talk – but until it became fashionable in the second half of the 19th century the Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish and Danes often didn’t). And in areas with ethnic and tribal divisions, even today those that claim to be ruling for the people often only mean their people, e.g. Saddam Hussein never bombed and gassed his people, and the Israelis are for the (non-Arab) Israelis.

Barry Loberfeld wrote “One is that, in contrast to the Anglo-American world, the term [liberal] largely retains its meaning on the Continent…”.

No, the meaning only shifted in the USA. To illustrate that, consider that the Liberal Party in Britain remained what it had been between the time its fellow travelling socialists left it over a century ago and the time it merged with a social democrat splinter from the Labour Party a generation ago, and in Australia the Liberal Party is the main right wing party.

@Alexander S. Peak:

“I define the left as small-government and the right as big-government. I define the far left as anti-government and the far right as totalitarian.”

This is a ridiculous statement. So according to you Obama’s taking over of GM, his regime’s continued interference in markets, his willingness to increase government’s role in our medical system, is therefore a SIGN OF SMALLER GOVERNMENT?

My friend it the larger the government the more slant we move in the political spectrum of the left hence it is: I’m going to simplify it for you, from left to right according to the size of government. Because the size of government effects social, political liberty not to mention economic liberty, ie. markets.

COMMUNISM SOCIALISM FASCISM DEMOCRATS/REPUBLICANS…………LIBERTARIANISM

I would hardly differentiate between reps/demos because the both are for pro-larger state. Republicans want it for their warfare, democrats want it for their welfare.

That would have been difficult, considering that Keynesianism wasn’t invented then. But loose thinking was, which never stopped people being “liberal” even in the original sense.

So? The corpus “Keynesianism” didn’t exist at that stage. For what it’s worth, Keynes thought of himself as a “liberal” in the relevant period, and indeed he was in most respects. It’s just the loose thinking thing that allows many people of all persuasions to let in other stuff that isn’t fully compatible with what they already have. That’s how 19th century British liberal thought let in a lot of fellow travelling socialists before those had a separate avenue they could use, and it’s probably how the US liberals first let in those who shifted the whole thing later.

“So? The corpus “Keynesianism” didn’t exist at that stage.”

Well “Keynesianism” is nothing more than the dressed up versions of collectivist/inflationist positions of previous economists, such as Irving Fisher. If we’re talking about the connotation of the term “Keynesianism,” it existed long before General theory, but wasn’t taken seriously. Either way, Keynes was extremely influential before general theory, as was the “Cambridge circus.” Anonymous is most likely referring to rise of inflationary thought perpetuated by certain economists in the 1920′s, for which Keynes is given credit for.

The original leftists spoken of obviously had a clear view of their enemy. They were almost certainly what we would now call ‘self-employed’ butcher, bakers and candlestick makers. They could see the competition within their professions using state machinery, and were quite naturally working against such privilege. Where do we lay a wreath for them?

“The First Leftists” omits that the early Classical Liberals were for against privilege of every kind, ESPECIALLY

The “First Leftists” omits that the early Classical Liberals were against privilege of every kind, ESPECIALLY the landed monopoly of the aristocracy. The Physiocrats advocated a land tax to encourage more efficient use. Later this sentiment was echoed by Adam Smith and Thomas Paine in Agrarian Justice. Anyone who opposes the taxation of land-values is in bed with the privileged class, such as Austrian economists.

I suppose the point I was trying to make, before the thread was hijacked by some indoctrinated cock, was that the self-employed lot were intimately involved with the prices etc of their professions, and therefore had a subject-matter authority that distinguished them from those whose aims were purely power-motivated