what a bunch of liberal bull. You've got to be one of Jake's friends "from the U"
Never met him before, but you're going to find that well-educated people tend to lean left. Reality has a liberal bias.
Liberty means liberty for all men not only to people to whom the government defines as deserving of it
Precisely. All liberals believe exactly that, always have, and always will. (Nowadays, we would say "men AND women." Feminism is a more recent development than classical liberalism, though, and those old liberals were often not very liberal in that regard.) Also, all liberals believe that the greatest danger to liberty is individuals holding too much power. That's true whether the power comes from government or outside it. To prevent one person holding too much power from the government, we champion separation of powers, democratic accountability, and protection of individual rights. To prevent one person holding too much power from outside the government, we champion regulation of business, leveling of wealth, and protection of the rights of working people. It's all in service to the same goal.
and for every so-called "limitation"
that you can cite I' can cite a 100 or more instances of expansion of government and it's power to control our lives there are probably 100 in the Obamacare law alone
Why don't you get specific here, and I will show you how those "expansions of government" are in service to the same ends as the restraints of government that liberals also believe in.
Truth is, liberals are not believers in either big government or limited government as an end in itself, but will use either one as appropriate to protect liberty and promote equality.
I know what the law says and if you are forced to send a person back into slavery once he is free that is legalized slavery in my book. And infringing on the rights of the non slave states.
Well, I would agree as far as my own values are concerned, naturally -- I am hardly an advocate of slavery! But you have to understand that in those days, slavery was a burning issue, not a dead one. If you advocated for abolishing it, you were a liberal (on that issue); if you wanted to preserve it you were a conservative. Today, of course, you won't find conservatives in favor of chattel slavery, because the issue is dead; our side won, and it is now a universal value rather than a political issue.
There's not much point in quoting liberals of the time, like Frederick Douglass, against the institution of slavery. I fully agree with the man, and with Lincoln that the nation could not ultimately remain half slave and half free; I consider the Fugitive Slave Act, and all other attempts to compromise around the issue, to have been futile, and I think the 600,000 casualties suffered in the Civil War pretty much proves that.
My only point in connection with this is that the Republican Party, which in its inception was an anti-slavery party, was therefore the
liberal party at that time. It was the Democrats -- the ones in the North who didn't want to rock the boat or make such a radical change as abolishing slavery, as well as the ones in the South who were so determined to preserve the institution that they sundered the union -- who were the conservatives.
I never said they were exactly the same but gernally Real conservative Republicans stand for liberty and liberal Dems stand for central planning and bigger more powerfull federal government
"Real conservative Republicans" certainly do not stand for MY liberty. Maybe they stand for the liberty of my boss (if I had a boss) -- at my expense, by failing to protect my rights as an employee. Maybe they stand for the liberty of big corporations to maximize their profits -- at the expense of their employees outsourced out of a job, or of the communities suffering their environmental degradations. Maybe they stand for the liberty of the very rich to accumulate as much private fortune as possible -- at the expense of those who would benefit from having some of that accumulated money invested in job-creating wealth-producing ventures and spread around a bit.
"Liberty" means nothing unless one defines whose liberty to do what one is talking about. Often, one person's liberty means another person's enslavement. For an obvious example, one person's liberty to own slaves cannot coexist with another person's liberty not to be a slave. Extrapolate that extreme example out to anything else: person A's liberty to oppress person B is incompatible with person B's freedom from oppression.
Conservatives, in such conflicts, stand with person A. Liberals stand with person B. What that means in terms of "expansion of government" depends on the exact circumstances. When it's the government that A is using to oppress B, then the power of the government to do that needs to be restrained. But when A is using his own private power to oppress B, and the government can be used to restrain A, then it should be so used.
The equation "liberal = big government" is completely simplistic and, as stated, not true. It isn't liberals who have generally championed the huge, overextended military establishment we have today, for example. It isn't liberals who want to re-criminalize abortion and in other ways have the government butt into people's private lives.
On the other hand, it is liberals who want to use government to regulate business so as to prevent both abuses against people's rights and the kind of collapse we had in '08. So liberals and conservatives both like big government in some areas and dislike it in others. The common factor lies elsewhere, and size of government may not be used as a definition.
