[Sent by mistake -- gmail has a service to stop an e-mail when sent by mistake, but I don't know how to use it.]
David Shemano wrote: >How about "liberals," which is what they were before the progressives coopted >the name.< Two apt definitions of "liberal" appear on line: -- favorable to or in accord with concepts of maximum individual freedom possible, especially as guaranteed by law and secured by governmental protection of civil liberties. -- favoring or permitting freedom of action, especially with respect to matters of personal belief or expression: a liberal policy toward dissident artists and writers. Both of these definitions fit the two common definitions of "liberal," i.e., (1) the classical or free-market liberals that David, Milton Friedman, and others see as "liberal" and (2) the modern or New Deal or Welfare State liberals of today's common parlance (and the target of the GOP's hate). The difference between classical and modern liberals comes from the sources of freedom and un-freedom and their definition of "freedom." The classicals see the state as the major source of un-freedom, except of course when it's protecting their individual property rights (which are the source of freedom). Folks like Milton Friedman see civil liberties (free speech, etc.) as unimportant compared to individual property rights and market freedom, but I'm sure that some of the classicals value civil liberties. Democracy doesn't seem to be valuable to the classical liberals, except in the form of a Lockean alliance of property-owners against the non-owners. The moderns see the state as a source of freedom when it provides stuff like social services. In this view (and I agree), "individual freedom" involves the availability of choices (whether they're due to individual ownership of property or not). Thus, when the state (for example) preserves a public park such as Yellowstone, it provides choices to individuals, i.e., freedom. It of course is also violating other individuals' freedom (by taxing them, by keeping developers from abusing the land and natural species, etc.) But while the classicals don't seem to value democracy, the moderns see these trade-offs as being dealt with only via democracy. -- Jim Devine / "When truth is nothing but the truth, it's unnatural, it's an abstraction that resembles nothing in the real world. In nature there are always so many other irrelevant things mixed up with the essential truth." -- Aldous Huxley _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
