Some Characteristics Of Today's Liberals

Confederate Yankee: Among The Left Branch Davidians, Part III

Above is a link to part of an article at Confederate Yankee about some puzzling characteristics of today's liberals. (It is in three parts, I linked to the third part because it has links to the other two. I recommend reading all three.) Read it and then compare it with the characteristics of liberals in the past.

If you read a book on western history in the 18th and 19th centuries, you can see just how far liberalism has evolved. In fact, if yesterday's liberals were alive today, they would feel most comfortable in the GOP or the Liberatrian parties. If today's liberals were to have lived then, they would be in line with the socialists of that day.

The original liberals were a response to absolutism and stood for freedom, liberty, and the right to self determination (with the exception of the French, who turned liberalism into a form of elitist tyranny and yet another example of trading one form of tyranny for another).

The founding fathers of this nation were liberals. They were free-market capitalists and self-sufficient at it. They never envisioned the people serving the government, but rather they believed that government should serve the people. Keeping the government small and out of people's lives was a priority.

Today's liberals are quite the opposite. They have managed to dupe a significant amount of people into believing that the government needs to be involved in more and more of the people's lives, thus reducing the freedoms cherished by the early liberals. They are not particularly fond of free market capitalism, in fact they have adopted an ideology that would have made Marx, Lenin, and Mao extremely proud. At every step, these modern day Robin Hoods are trying to circumvent any legitimate attempt to make it easier for businesses to create jobs, through the false assumptions that even distribution of wealth is an inherent right.

They ask the government to intervene in the private sector in order to gain an advantage over those that own capital, those take the necessary risks with that capital, and those that create opportunities with that capital. They do it through frivolous lawsuits and socialist legislation, designed to cripple the ability to create wealth.

What they fail to see is that there have always been wealthy landowners, owners of factories, and owners of other forms of capital. If you took all of the money and capital in the world, took it and divided it equally with everyone getting an equal share, the same people that have it now would get it all back in due time.

When the New Deal was fashioned, it was done so as a response to a crisis that had never befallen this nation before. Keep in mind that unemployment was at 25%. Something had to be done to fix the problem. It was never intended to become a way of life, but was intended to be temporary relief for people that had fallen on hard times.

But as we move the New Deal into the latter part of the century, we see that was not enough. Instead of moving the nation away from dependency, LBJ dreamed up a sales campaign known as the Great Society. More giveaway and more government control resulted in more dependency (and more votes). Did you ever wonder why inflation was so high during both the Johnson and Carter administrations? (I will save this answer for another rant, another day.)

I am sure you get the idea. But I will leave you with a quote from Isaiah Berlin:

I am normally said to be free to the degree to which no man or body of men interferes with my activity. Political liberty in this sense is simply the area within which a man can act unobstructed by others. If I am prevented by others from doing what I could otherwise do, I am to that degree unfree; and if this area is contracted by other men beyond a certain minimum, I can be described as being coerced, or, it may be, enslaved. Coercion is not, however, a term that covers every form of inability. If I say that I am unable to jump more than ten feet in the air, or cannot read because I am blind…it would be eccentric to say that I am to that degree enslaved or coerced. Coercion implies the deliberate interference of other human beings within the area in which I could otherwise act. You lack political liberty or freedom only if you are prevented from attaining a goal by other human beings (Berlin, 1969: 122).

And that my friends, is as far from today's liberal as you can get.