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- #21
"The term liberal is based in libertarian ideals...."
That's false.
Communist John Dewey prevailed upon the Socialist Party to change its name to 'Liberal.'
The term Liberal today, colloquially, means 'Socialst.'
Let's try a little more education:
How Socialist John Dewey Switched Labels
by Jim Peron
- Pity the poor liberal. And I mean the real liberal. Not the modern watered-down socialist who calls himself a liberal but a real, honest, classical liberal. There is so much confusion over the term and real liberals have allowed fake liberals to get away with this subtle destruction of the language.
- The classical liberals proposed laissez faire and this led to prosperity. The economics of 19th century liberalism brought about a major increase in the standard of living of all people. Thus real liberalism produced the effects which socialists dreamed their system would provide.
- Many socialists wanted prosperity and thought socialism would lead to such results faster than classical liberalism. But at the same time many socialists saw their ideology as a means of grabbing power for themselves and it was the power, not the promised prosperity, which attracted them.
- [Socialists] knew that liberalism had a good reputation with the working classes — the very audience which they were targeting. The idea was to adopt the name liberal to describe socialism. Socialism, as socialism, was harder to sell. But by taking a name they did not deserve they felt they could make political gains on the backs of classical liberalism. And they did.
- In the United States, where liberalism most clearly reversed its meaning, in common parlance, it was the socialist John Dewey who openly promoted the idea of stealing the liberal label. Dewey, in his book Individualism Old and Newargued that liberal individualism had in fact disappeared and been replaced by state capitalism and that collectivism already existed in America.
- But he noted the collectivism of that day was a “collectivism of profit” and not a “collectivism of planning”. He said the only way liberalism could return to its true meaning was to adopt socialism as the means by which liberal goals would be achieved. As he put it central economic planning was “the sole method of social action by which liberalism can realize its professed aims.”
- Peter Witonski, in his essay The Historical Roots of American Planningsaid: “Dewey was the first to argue that the world ‘liberal’—which once stood for liberal, free-market capitalism—could better serve the needs of social democracy in America than the world ‘socialism’.
- The liberalism of Adam Smith was out-of-date Dewey argued.” In his book Liberalism and Social Action, Dewey suggested that the goals of a free society could best be obtained “only by a reversal of the means to which early liberalism was committed.” But the means of liberalism were fundamentally connected to the basic premises of liberalism. A reversal of means, while keeping similar goals in mind, also changed the premises of liberalism. The “new wisdom” of Keynes with the “reversal of means” of Dewey really meant stealing the name of liberalism and applying it to another very different species. The famed economist Joseph Schumpeter noted that “the enemies of private enterprise have thought it wise to appropriate its label.”
- Today a great deal of confusion reigns because socialists decided to deceptively call their own ideology liberal. And, to a very large degree, the academics who wrote the recent texts on liberalism were socialists. Hence they were quite willing to pretend that socialism was a modern form of classical liberalism.
- [Classical] liberal describes individuals supporting free markets, private property, profit management and limited governments. o-called “liberals” support socialism, state ownership, bureaucratic management and statism.
