Q: Mr Huhne. The word "liberal" implies a willingness to allow others their freedom. Since your party - the party of high taxes and economic regulation - respects freedom the least, can we please have our word back? Posted by Tim S on November 20, 2007 10:20 PM
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/11/21/nosplit/view19.xml

RyanBerks
Right now if I had to think of one thing to differentiate the liberal dems, the only thing I could think of is that they want to tax us more, in a stealthy way of course... bizarre for a supposedly Liberal party!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2215070,00.html

 There are more, plenty more and not just from outside the party. The concept of freedom is one that all liberal democrats should hold dear to themselves. The entire point of liberalism which separates it from conservatism and socialism is that it aims to free the individual (whether within society or without it). This means that the government aims to allow people to live their lives their own way without trying to patronise, or control the actions and thoughts of those individuals. Conservatism puts government as an institution to keep order and stability; Socialists consider it to be the means of taking control of private property and declaring public ownership of the means of production and establishing equality and for those of the Third Way persuasion government is the political manager of a country attempting to give people what it thinks they want which happens to be social democratic principles delivered through new right methods and the acceptance of the world view of the new right. For liberals however government is simply nothing more than the tool that allows people to live their life in prosperity and happiness as they individually please. If government is to act then it is to free people from the coercive and inhumane consequences of it not acting and even if this is so it should only act if it has a mandate from those people which its actions shall affect. Government should not take a moralistic patronizing line with its citizens but rather allow them to make up their own minds on controversial personal moral issues even though the views these people come to may be offensive to everyone else including the liberals themselves. If people are being prevented from doing something that will make them happy but would not harm any other individual then the government has a duty to step in to allow them to do as they wish.

New Labour talks about maximising statistics, economic indicators, social statistical indicators, reducing waiting times, reducing statistical poverty because only the numbers can tell the truth, only the numbers are a true measurement of success in the great challenge of competent political management. Conservatives talk of the moral nature of Britain, of its degradation under New Labour, parents living in sin, the rights of minorities, gypsies and gays getting in the way of those of the majority, a utopian worship of a Britain long since passed that the government must protect and even strive towards although this fantastical vision of a traditional Britain may neither be historically real or appropriate for the modern world. Liberals however talk of freedom, individuality, choice and tolerance. People are not numbers, happiness cannot be measured, humans cannot be made happier, better, more moral beings. It is only through them and through their own society that people can make themselves happy, make themselves better and choose their own beliefs. To a liberal there is no set way of life, no right or wrong way, there is only one way of life and that way is your own, you own your own life and you should choose how to live it. Government is there to stop other individuals, organisations and even, to an extent, situations coercing you and dictating your life, People must be free from coercive force as much as is rationally possible and coercion must be used only in the prevention of harm and coercion to others. That is my freedom, my liberalism, my liberty and it is one shared, although perhaps not understood, by so many others like me. 

There is however a different view of liberty, of freedom and thus of liberalism (for surely the objective of any ideology calling itself liberalism must be to liberate and free people). It is both new and old for it has had its days of fashion come, pass and come again. It is material, it is methodical and it is - that most abhorrent term – economical. Human life according to these purveyors of liberty has a monetary value and it is money that makes us free. Some might say I am being too harsh on these people but it is true, it is liberalism for economists, from John Kay to Milton Friedman, who all believe that you can put a monetary value to human life, to nearly everything in fact, and argue for this view by perpetuating that we already do this in our day to day lives. When we give money to charity we are putting a monetary value on the importance of that charitable cause, when the government deals out money it puts a value on the amount of lives that money will save, it is fine for the government to lock away a man and take away his freedoms for committing a crime but heaven forbid if the monetary cost is too much. Actions are not taken so much because of moral values but because of the monetary market and the rational limitations this places on us as both individuals and as a society.

 Money does place a rational limitation upon the capabilities of governments, firms and individuals but that does not necessarily make these limitations morally right or inevitable. Mixing moral sentiment and economics is the grand inhumane flaw practised by these ‘liberals’ because it ultimately leads to the grand misconception that what is economical, market based and monetarily linked is the most humane and effective way of dealing with humanity’s problems. It is a rule, nay, a dogma that can lead to grand inhumanities from the market based solutions of the British government towards the Irish potato famine to the modern day housing shortage which, in the eyes of these liberals can only be solved by lowering taxes on housing and the opening up of property rights when in reality this simply places more power in the hands of the development companies whose interests lie not in building the much needed social housing that the poor and dispossessed homeless people of this country need but in keeping house prices high, in maintaining the status quo of high profits in exchange for homelessness and hopelessness for those of my generation who one day wish to own a home of their own.

Mitt Romney recently said that conservatism was all about strength and that you made people stronger by lowering their taxes. This is not the view of a liberal; liberalism has never been about strength it is about justice, freedom and the abolition of unfair undue privilege. However Romney’s conservatism is where the true sentiment lies for these ‘liberals’. Their liberalism lies not in creating justice for all people, not in creating a fair and open society, it lies simply with money and with the personal gains and strength they believe will come from the government taking back the money it gives to itself and society as a whole in order to give it back to the tax payer. That does not create liberty or equality; in the modern world of corporations and wage labour it merely leads to the privilege of a few and the destitution of those below. After all, it is not strength that Mitt Romney talks about, it is privilege. Anybody who has heard of or seen the conditions of the working classes in Dubai knows the realities of a laissez faire state, they know that it creates a divide between rich and poor, a sense of powerlessness within the lower classes and how can people possibly be free if they feel powerless to improve the conditions of their own life let alone their society.

Liberals do not argue for a laissez faire state, they argue for a minimal state or rather a state that among other things takes as little as is necessary for itself. That does not mean the state does not give to society what society wants, it does not mean the state should seek to stop the coercions of capitalists against the workers, of uncontrollable markets against individuals. Liberal state intervention is justified when the people want it and the power of markets do not have the interests of society at heart. Freedom is not a ten pound note; only the greedy ever feel freed by money itself, if we want to free people truly as liberals we should not look towards tax cuts, economic deregulation and a laissez faire state. We should instead look at the things in society that trap people and stop them from fulfilling their goals and potential, government must remove the sources of coercion within society: poverty, an overbearing state, privilege, powerlessness and blockades to enterprise and free thought. If this means we remove economic regulation, create tax cuts and move further towards a laissez faire state then so be it but that does not make those policies equivalent to liberalism, it merely makes them methods that can be adopted by a liberal state.

Liberals must seek to reclaim liberalism from the new right, to show that liberalism and conservatism are incompatible theories and finally must make the case that liberal democracy is the only ideology capable of serving the interests of all and the vested interests of none in the modern world. We must tell the world that liberalism is there to free you and empower you against coercion upon your way of life, not to make you richer, for the government which attempts such aims will only succeed in debasing the spirit of humanity to nothing more than a greedy, self satisfying pig. That is the difference between liberalism and ‘liberalism’.

by John Dixon at http://aradicalwrites.blogspot.com