Liberalism vs Libertarianism for dummies

[manifold]

Liberalism says no man is an island. Libertarianism says every man is an island.

So even though they both employ the root word 'liber', which is Latin for free, more often than not they are diametrically opposed when it comes to the practical application of their concept of freedom.

So, are you an island?

 

[Cuyo]

Libertarian = Republican that wants to smoke pot.

 

[bripat9643]

Liberalism says no man is an island. Libertarianism says every man is an island.

So even though they both employ the root word 'liber', which is Latin for free, more often than not they are diametrically opposed when it comes to the practical application of their concept of freedom.

So, are you an island?

To liberals "freedom" means freedom from work, freedom from responsibility. It basically means being a useless parasite.

 

[eflatminor]

Libertarianism means freedom. Exactly the opposite of today's central planners...the so called "Liberals".

 

[manifold]

Libertarianism means freedom. Exactly the opposite of today's central planners...the so called "Liberals".

They both mean freedom.

Try again.

 

[Quantum Windbag]

Liberalism says no man is an island. Libertarianism says every man is an island.

So even though they both employ the root word 'liber', which is Latin for free, more often than not they are diametrically opposed when it comes to the practical application of their concept of freedom.

So, are you an island?

Yes.

 

[eflatminor]

Libertarianism means freedom. Exactly the opposite of today's central planners...the so called "Liberals".

They both mean freedom.

Try again.

Well of course you're right...literally but not in reality. What we call today Libertarians were traditionally called Liberals. This is why I refer to myself as a "Classical Liberal". Anyway, it's from the Latin "liber", which means "free".

Today's "Liberals" are better referred to as Progressives or Central Planners and their tactics are about anything but freedom.

 

[Oddball]

By the classic definition, today's "liberals" are about as illberal as you can get.

But what do you want from people -as both Rand and Orwell observed- who have spent the last century debasing the English language?

Historically speaking, the left were 'progressives' then 'liberals'; now they want to be 'progressives' again. Around the start of the 20th century (circa 1900), the term progressive came into popularity and common use. It was used proudly by many on the left to describe their political ideology until sometime in the 1940s when it began to fade away. Essentially, the progressives themselves showed the American public what it was that a progressive believed through President Woodrow Wilson's anti-Capitalism and pro-Socialism stances, onto which President Franklin D. Roosevelt placed an exclamation point with his New Deal.

<snip>

It didn't take long for the common man to realize that a liberal was a re-packaged progressive who stood against the values and historical traditions that made America great. President Lyndon B. Johnson made that message clear with his Great Society, forever ruining the term &#8216;liberal.'

<snip>

On July 23rd, 2007, then-presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton let out the battle cry heard around the world in the CNN-YouTube Democratic Debate: the left will begin to re-use the term 'progressive' to define themselves. In her words, when asked straight up, "How would you define the word 'liberal' and would you use this word to define yourself?" she replied, "I prefer the word 'progressive' which has a real American meaning going back to the Progressive Era at the beginning of the 20th century. I consider myself a modern progressive."

So there it is! A progressive is a liberal is a progressive again.

Archived-Articles: A Liberal by Any Other Name

 

[ladyliberal]

While modern liberals aren't classical libertarians by any means, part of the problem is that libertarianism has come to have a very narrow meaning, particularly to the Tea Party. Many people understand libertarianism to mean either economic freedoms or freedom from the government. For that reason, plenty of Tea Party Patriots see no contradiction between their libertarianism and ignoring or opposing: religious freedom (particularly for Muslims), access to controlled substances, rights of criminal defendants, rights of immigrants, rights to abortion and birth control, right to vote (voter ID, direct elections of Senators), access to the courts, access to education, and access to health care. Basically today a "libertarian" usually wants gun rights, small and local government, and property rights.

To me as a liberal, there are inherent contradictions between human rights and property rights. Viewing the right to speech as a human right suggests that each human should have a very roughly equal voice in the public forums (such as this one). However, in a mass-media society, the number of people one can reach by running commercials is very nearly proportionate to one's net worth, making speech a sort of a property right as well. For the most part we allow this, but campaign finance laws rightly try to keep wealthy individuals from having too much of an outsize influence. Fortunately, the most extreme exercise of property rights over human rights, slavery, was ended through government action, the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution. Clearly, the government has a role to play in protecting human rights even at the expense of property rights: the question is where to draw the lines.

 

[bripat9643]

Libertarianism means freedom. Exactly the opposite of today's central planners...the so called "Liberals".

They both mean freedom.

Try again.

Wrong.