On Liberals (Classical)

[Bill Mattocks]

Saw this interview with Gary Johnson, independent candidate for President, and I'm liking him more and more:

http://video.foxnews.com/v/1465916459001/a-third-party-president

But he mentioned his Libertarianism and compared it to "Classical Liberalism," but he defined it as a basic Conservative position. What?

Then I remembered what I once knew about Classical Liberalism...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_liberalism

Government, as explained by Adam Smith, had only three functions: protection against foreign invaders, protection of citizens from wrongs committed against them by other citizens, and building and maintaining public institutions and public works that the private sector could not profitably provide. Classical liberals extended protection of the country to protection of overseas markets through armed intervention. Protection of individuals against wrongs normally meant protection of private property and enforcement of contracts and the suppression of trade unions and the Chartist movement. Public works included a stable currency, standard weights and measures, and support of roads, canals, harbors, railways, and postal and other communications services.

Sounds like a conservative point of view to me.

Kind of funny, huh?

 

[elder999]

Sounds like a conservative point of view to me.

Kind of funny, huh?

Then you wrap your head around the idea of "Rockefeller Republicans," "Liberal Republicans," and take a look at the words and actions of Teddy Roosevelt, and see just how "conservative" Republicans have actually been, historically........

....it's almost as funny as calling Nazis "left wing." :lol:

 

[Bill Mattocks]

....it's almost as funny as calling Nazis "left wing." :lol:

Nazis, to my mind, were neither left nor right wing. They were populists. They combined popular dislike of big business and wealth concentrated in the hands of a few with dislike of communism and being forced to remain in debt to the world and weak militarily and ran with it. They appealed to both the left and the right of the time. I think it is a mistake in general to insist on placing everything on either the left or the right side of the spectrum, when there are all sorts of political positions that simply cannot be defined in that way.

 

[Empty Hands]

Sounds like a conservative point of view to me.

Kind of funny, huh?

That's because when it was invented, as in the writings of John Locke or Adam Smith, the ideas of freedom, representative government, and the protection of property were radically liberal - nearly revolutionary. Conservatism of the time was monarchism and aristocracy (more for Locke than Smith). Conservatism and liberalism are not a set of policy positions, they are a tendency or an outlook. That's why Iranian theocrats and American Libertarians can both be conservative. Or how Communism slowly turned from a leftist/revolutionary point of view to a conservative point of view in the USSR once it became firmly established over a few generations.

If Conservatism only means "anti-abortion, pro-gun, and small government" for forever and all time, then conservatism did not even exist until relatively recently.