Well, I can't identify myself as a libertarian anymore. I'm not as hardcore as complete anarchy though, so... What am I? The right already had conservatism, why do they have to take libertarian too...
Possibly because there is already a term for a left wing believer in personal freedom who doesn't go to anarchist levels. The term is "liberal".
Which in classic usage, refers to a believer in limited government and free-market prosperity as the solution to societal ills. See the "Liberal Party" in Australia, which is in fact their conservative party.
Well it's all relative. The practices that the classical liberals were speaking out against were heavy handed and ill advised attempts by monarchs to manhandle the economy. Mercantalism was in common practice and the primary function of every government was to tax the poor to pay for a large standing army. Consider for example what Adam Smith, the father of free markets, had to say about banking regulation:
To restrain private people, it may be said, from receiving in payment the promissory notes of a banker for any sum, whether great or small, when they themselves are willing to receive them; or, to restrain a banker from issuing such notes, when all his neighbours are willing to accept of them, is a manifest violation of that natural liberty, which it is the proper business of law not to infringe, but to support.
Such regulations may, no doubt, be considered as in some respects a violation of natural liberty. But those exertions of the natural liberty of a few individuals, which might endanger the security of the whole society, are, and ought to be, restrained by the laws of all governments; of the most free, as well as of the most despotical. The obligation of building party walls, in order to prevent the communication of fire, is a violation of natural liberty, exactly of the same kind with the regulations of the banking trade which are here proposed.
Which doesn't leave much up to the imagination.
Or on public education:
For a very small expence the public can facilitate, can encourage, and can even impose upon almost the whole body of the people, the necessity of acquiring those most essential parts of education.
On infrastructure:
...thirdly, the duty of erecting and maintaining certain public works and certain public institutions, which it can never be for the interest of any individual, or small number of individuals, to erect and maintain; because the profit could never repay the expence to any individual, or small number of individuals, though it may frequently do much more than repay it to a great society.
The classical liberals were all like this. They were objecting to government regulations because there were a lot of crappy government regulations around. They were arguing for more of a market economy and less of a command economy. But that isn't the split between modern liberals and today's "classical liberals". Modern liberals aren't arguing for a command economy, just a regulated one to deal with negative externalities and dangerous practices.
In many ways it's the same mistake people made with the cold war. The soviet union showed us that while communism was great at building factories, it was pretty crappy when it came to running them in a way that got people the stuff they wanted. This tells us that planned economies are a bad idea. Yet people use the failures of a command economy to make and distribute consumer goods as a reason of why government managed healthcare won't work. This is despite the fact that government healthcare had a good a pretty good track record at the exact same time that communism was crashing and burning.
When people invoke the classical liberals, they are invoking the failure of mercantilism, guilds, serfdom and nobility. But they are using that failure to argue against things like education, public safety and infrastructure, the exact sort of things that were proving to be very good investments at the time of the classical liberals!
To put it simply, the liberals of today are pretty much the classical liberals of auld lang syne. Some of the issues that we face today did not exist. There were no government run healthcare programs because medical science barely existed. There weren't welfare programs because those aren't often necessary in a largely agrarian society (which did lead to the classical liberals in England horribly mismanaging the Irish famine.") But there was an economy that should have been run on market principles with government intervention in a few places. Which neatly describes the liberal outlook of today.
Everything is either "Everyone pays high taxes so we can give out a bunch of social policies" (left) and "Everyone pays low taxes and the government doesn't give out a bunch of social policies" (right).
I object to that characterization of the left. The left would often be perfectly happy to achieve their policies through low tax means if that were politically viable. Just look at Australia, a country with low inequality. Even here in America, that analogy falls apart. President Bush's Medicare Part D initiative cost more then Obama's signature healthcare act. But it's okay if you are a republican to start expensive new policies and pay for them with increasing the national debt.
BTW, the huge Medicare Part D boondoggle, subsidizing people to buy medicine with a policy that increased the cost of medicine, is a prime example of the exact sort of heavy handed intervention that classical liberals said governments should avoid.
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Topic: Occupying Wallstreet (Read 294799 times)