What is Liberalism? How can it be defined in such a way that it provides curious Americans with a specific answer? I'll attempt to address these in my two-part article.
(This is the first part of a new feature on Liberalism and comments to strengthen it, including links, is very very appreciated)
I was watching a Sunday morning talk show a few years ago when I heard the strangest thing. It sounded like a intellectual’s voice, intelligent, authoritative, and yet the words coming out were so ignorant, so foolish, so lacking of understanding that I was truly baffled.
The person was conservative columnist George Will, and words he spoke were something along the lines of this:
“Liberalism is about equality.”
Nope. Wrong, George Will. It’s a common misconception though, isn’t it? Saying that Liberalism is about “equality” is a convenient way to invoke the frightening spectre of Communism and its cousin, Socialism. The word “equality” (which should in and of itself be a “nice” thing) invokes the idea that Liberals are all out of their minds, obsessed with the idea of stealing the wealth of the rich and spreading it around to the poor so that everyone is “equal.” No one is rich, no one is poor, yadda yadda yadda.
A scary preposition, no?
Of course, it’s false. While 100 percent of Liberals would argue that the Civil Rights Act and the Equal Rights amendment are good things, great things even, Liberalism isn’t about “equality.” The reason is because Liberalism, at its core, is a movement set inside the realm of Capitalism, and in Capitalism you have poor and you have rich. So let’s amend George Will’s erroneous statement and provide a more accurate definition.
Liberalism is about equality of opportunity.
“Impossible,” says Joe Conservative. “Especially not with the government helping!”
I beg to differ. For you see, I’m a product of government intervention. I grew up in the Milwaukee Public School system, went to a public university for my bachelor’s degree and received my Master’s Degree from another public university. To get to these places, I drove on our government-run (and planned) roads, and when I was young I played in our government-run parks. Milwaukee County’s park system, in fact, is one of the best in the country. So is the government-owned zoo.
“But that’s socialism!” says Joe Conservative.
It’s true: government-owned enterprises are a quality of what we broadly call “Socialism.” All big ideas overlap with one another. One can just as easily argue that Conservatism requires a fair amount of fascism, too, but that doesn’t mean Conservatism and fascism are the same things. But Liberalism still exists inside of a Capitalist system, so the trick now is to set limits for Liberalism’s encroachment onto the marketplace to distinguish it from “Socialism.”
Liberalism allows government interference in the marketplace when the marketplace isn’t “working.”
This isn’t a wild, new idea. In fact, even the more rigorous forms of conservatism—like libertarianism, for instance—allow government intervention in a society. For an extreme ideology like libertarianism, government is supposed to only control the army, police and courts. The goal, with libertarianism, is to limit government intervention to the point that it’s only focused on protecting the rights of an individual.
Freedom!
But who, then, will own and operate our roads? Our highways? Our fire departments? Our prisons? Well, those are trickier propositions, and the libertarian movement has developed dozens of different solutions, each one at odds with a considerable number of libertarians. And so with no clear way of moving forward, Libertarianism generally contents itself with sitting on the sidelines complaining about everyone else.
Once, when debating a rather intelligent libertarian, I found myself stuck in a corner. The conservative wanted me to “admit” I’m a Liberal.
I prefer the term “realist,” I responded instead. He was not amused.
But I pose this question: who exactly will own and operate our roads if not our government? More importantly, can you see any possible negative outcomes from this? Even most self-described conservatives would disagree with the idea that a private organization or individual should be allowed to buy up our roads and highways; the question then becomes a matter of how much the government should do.
An example: our prison system. It’s become privatized greatly since the 1980s to the point that companies operate prisons just as they would a business, stiffing the taxpayer with the bill. How can a private prison be cheaper? Easy. They just use fewer guards. They pay them less, too. They don’t train them as well. And since the private prison companies are all for-profit entities, a smaller prison population isn’t as “profitable,” is it? So what do they do? They lobby for more laws and harsher sentences so more people can be arrested and end up in prison. Is it really any surprise the United States imprisons more of its citizens than any other developed nation? (By a wide margin, to boot.)
Liberalism solves this problem by simply taking prisons out of the marketplace and putting it in the hands of the government. Our government. The one we the people elect. When operated by the government, a prison doesn’t need to answer to shareholders like a private corporation would need to do. There are no “donations” to legislators with the expectation of something in return—namely, harsher prison sentences. There is, essentially, a much lower conflict of interest, and citizens can elect new legislators if they disagree with current prison policies.
Let’s try another one, only broaden it a little bit. Let’s talk about our beloved parks. This includes our amazing national parks like Yellowstone and the local park in your neighborhood. There are three options for how we as a society can deal with parkland:
1. We can sell the land to a private entity and let them do what they want with it (libertarianism).
2. We can keep the land as government property but pay a private corporation to take care of it (conservatism).
3. We can keep the land as government property and have the government pay its own workers to take care of it (Liberalism).
The first option is a libertarian option. It takes government out of it completely (remember: individual freedom, only police). What are the downsides? Well, for starters, you won’t have parkland anymore because it’s not profitable. What is profitable is converting that parkland into a brand new condo. Or maybe a few dozen houses. After all, a little city inside Yellowstone would be nice, wouldn’t it? Or maybe the loggers would like to lease part of that land and take away a couple hundred thousand of those pesky trees. Or perhaps in order to sustain costs, the private organizations would simply charge a much higher fee, which of course means only people making a certain amount of money can enjoy it.
Option 2, the one most commonly used by conservatives (and often by libertarians like the Cato Institute who know selling off parkland is wildly unpopular) focuses on simply “privatizing” the parks. Let a for-profit company come in and do it for cheaper. How will they do it cheaper? Why, they’ll use workers who get paid far less and of course they’ll cut corners whenever possible. The logic is that the “Free Market” will “come up with new, innovative ways” to save taxpayer money.