You see a lot of people in America who will self identify as “liberal”, but in almost all cases those people are in fact the opposite of liberal.  The general understanding of the definition of “liberal” in America has changed greatly over the years and now means authoritarian.

This reality and the widespread misunderstanding of it have bothered me for a long time.  In fact, while re-reading portions of F.A. Hayek’s incredibly good The Road to Serfdom a few weeks ago, I saw that Hayek himself addressed it.

When I first read Hayek’s classic, which contends that all collectivist systems ultimately descend into tyranny, I was initially confused by his use of the word liberal to describe people that I would more properly label as libertarians.  My confusion was based upon the reality that the word liberal got hijacked in America by people who are most decidedly not liberal.  In the 1956 preface to the book, Hayek addresses this directly:

The fact that this book was originally written with only the British public in mind does not appear to have seriously affected its intelligibility for the American reader.  But there is one point of phraseology which I ought to explain here to forestall any misunderstanding.  I use throughout the term “liberal” in the original, nineteenth-century sense in which it is still current in Britain.  In current American usage it often means very nearly the opposite of this.  It has been part of the camouflage of leftist movements in this country, helped by the muddleheadedness of many who really believe in liberty, that “liberal” has come to mean the advocacy of almost every kind of government control. I am still puzzled why those in the United States who truly believe in liberty should not only have allowed the left to appropriate this almost indispensible term but should even have assisted by beginning to use it themselves as a term of opprobrium.  This seems to be particularly regrettable because of the consequent tendency of many true liberals to describe themselves as conservative.

In other words, let’s stop playing along with their self-congratulatory but demonstrably false labeling.

When someone self-labels as a liberal, ask that person if they support ObamaCare or the takeover of the student loan program, for example.  If they answer affirmatively, you should calmly but firmly communicate to them that liberal is an inappropriate word to describe their ideology and that the more correct term is authoritarian or, even better, statist.  Mark Levin has returned the word statist to the lexicon and it is absolutely the most correct word to use when describing the American Left.  They do not believe in individual liberty.  What they do believe in is massively increased centralized control over the lives of the American people.  That is the opposite of freedom.

In my case, I am a lowercase-L libertarian conservative, and I am far more correctly described as a [classical] liberal than any American so-called liberals.  Unlike the American Left, I do believe in individual liberty, whereas they see us all as livestock living on their government collective.

Bad economic policies can throw economies into downturns, and delay recoveries. Keynesian economics and rising effective tax rates produced four worsening inflation/recession cycles in and around the 1970s: 1969-1970, 1973-1974, 1979-1980, and 1982.

But Reaganomics was so successful that it all but abolished the business cycle for a generation. The economy took off at the end of 1982 on a 25-year economic boom interrupted by only two, short, shallow recessions in 1990-1991 and 2001. That is why today we no longer recognize the natural workings of the business cycle.

He makes a good point.  Several years ago, well before our current government-caused financial crisis, it dawned on me that I was incredibly lucky to have lived my entire adult life in such comfortable and successful times.  Most people have indeed forgotten that there is a natural business cycle.

The slow and weak recovery from the recession, which has lasted almost two years (a postwar record), shows yet again the failure of Keynesian economics, continuing a long, unbroken record of failure stretching back to the 1930s.

But the Obama Administration came into office knowing that the economy would ultimately recover as the business cycle turned up naturally, and planned to reap the political credit, enabling still greater leaps of neo-socialism. Internally, they are surprised and miffed that it has taken so long, not understanding that their own, blindly anti-market policies only delayed recovery.

Virtually every economic decision made by Mr. Obama since the start of his presidency has perplexed me.  Admittedly, by late 2008 it was obvious to me who this character was and I fully expected him to govern like a naïve leftist, at least initially.  But having witnessed a few of these cycles I also predicted that the self-preservation that often springs from plunging approval ratings would force some economic pragmatism reminiscent of Bill Clinton’s triangulations in the mid-nineties.  However, this President’s ideologically based proposals seem so clearly bad for the economic outlook that I am left with only two choices for explanations.  Either they really are that clueless about economics or their ideology simply trumps it.  Neither of those scenarios bode well for Americans, particularly the future generations about whom today’s liberals seem so coldly unconcerned.

Quoting Art Laffer (of Laffer Curve fame), the author makes the argument that 2010 will be the best economic year of President Obama’s reign.  First, there is a natural bounce-back that can be expected after this deep a fall.  Combined with the effects, albeit short term, of the massive monetary expansion by the Federal Reserve and an artificial heightened productivity resulting from an attempt to beat the tax increases of 2011 this should cause a bubble of growth in 2010.

But Laffer ominously continues that “when the U.S. economy comes to 2011, the train’s going to come off the tracks.”  He argues that the effect of the massive monetary expansion by the Fed will be “petering out” and points out that changes to tax policy are going to contribute to this economic stagnation and collapse:

“And we haven’t even begun to talk about the tax rate increases of 2011. These purely ideological abuses of economic policy will end up punishing working people nationwide. The top income tax rate is scheduled to increase by close to 20%, the capital gains tax rate by at least 33%, and the top dividends tax rate by 164%. Further tax increases in the pending health care legislation would raise these tax rates still more.”

The article’s author closes with this assessment:

Again, just the opposite of the long-term economic boom that followed the 1982 downturn when Reagan first slayed inflation, the flowering of growth in Obama’s second year will be followed by long-term stagnation and economic decline for America, slaying the American Dream, until President Obama’s neo-socialist economic policies are reversed.

I think that the writing is already on the wall for the November 2010 elections.  It will almost certainly be a disaster for the Democrats.  If Laffer’s dismal economic forecast is accurate, the 2012 elections could be an epic landslide reflecting an outright rejection of the American left’s love affair with Big Government Keynesianism.

Now enjoy this enjoyably funny video of “Keynes and Hayek” rapping about their conflicting economic theories.

Nobody saw this more clearly than the great political thinker de Toqueville that democracy stands in an irreconcilable conflict with socialism:  “Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom,” he said.  “Democracy attaches all possible value to each man,” he said in 1848, “while socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number.  Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality.  But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.”

To allay these suspicions and to harness to its cart the strongest of all political motives – the craving for freedom – socialists began to increasingly make use of the promise of a “new freedom.”  Socialism was to bring “economic freedom,” without which political freedom was “not worth having.”

To make this argument sound plausible, the word “freedom” was subjected to a subtle change in meaning.  The word had formerly meant freedom from coercion, from the arbitrary power of other men.  Now it was made to mean freedom from necessity, release from the compulsion of the circumstances which inevitably limit the range of choice of all of us.  Freedom in this sense is, of course, merely another name for power or wealth.  The demand for the new freedom was thus only another name for the old demand for a redistribution of wealth.

Excellent.

I once had a long argument with my one liberal brother and his (pretty much marxist) significant other where I tried to make this very point.  I tried to explain that if we gathered up all of the things that people like to call “rights” there would be a clear line down the center that divides these so-called rights very unambiguously.  On one side of that line are legitimate rights; exercising these rights only requires that people stay out of your way (avoiding the “arbitrary power of men”, as Hayek put it).  On the other side of that dividing line are rights that require that someone do something for you.  I argued strenuously that any right that requires that someone take action or fund your “right” is not a right at all.  For example, you have a right to free speech but no one is required to provide you with a soapbox on which to stand.  You have a right to keep and bear arms but we do not have to buy your gun for you.  On the other side of that line, you do not have any “right” to expect anyone to subsidize your lifestyle by, for example, paying for your health care.  Calling something like that a “right” is simply dressing up the act of using government to take another person’s property.