Talk:Left Liberalism/@comment-174.1.130.159-20151011151237/@comment-26279493-20151011205254

From the perspective of a person who admits to being a Liberal, I have to disagree. Liberalism, to most of us Liberals is still and always about Individual Liberty. Yes, we believe in a robust State, but we also believe in rubust and equal Individual rights.

While I appreciate that you may enjoy getting your information about Liberals from popular infotainment sources, I wont accept your propositions based upon pseudofacts from those sources. Liberalism is not a kind of Socialism, and Nazi-ism and facism are certainly not. Fascism, and Nazi-ism (National Socialism) are very similar systems: both deny individual liberty in favor of a business/government partnership and elite privilege (cronyism in the extreme in your language). As for Communism and socialism, they are competing philosophies to Liberalism which do greater of lesser degree seek collective benefit by collective ownership, and we Liberals see them as giving too much power to the collective Society.

Many of us Liberals understand that there are two competing forces recognized by our philosophy, individualism and collectivism, and that only by balancing these two powers can we be secure and free. The collectivism of this pair (government) is established by individuals to promote the freedom and security of Individuals. The Free Market you speak of can only exist or be approximated with the promotion and protection of the collective power of government. The problem of modern economics, from the Liberal perspective might be seen as the distortions caused by entry of collective enterprises into markets. What is a for-profit corporation, after all, but a collective of capitalists created and empowered by government? A Liberal might look at modern problems and see them as the result of a fundamental error by government in allowing collective enterprises to exist when they no longer serve the purpose for which the government created them. We Liberals accept a certain amount of what you conservatives might call welfare as necessary in present circumstances, not becuase it's desirable, but because it's necessary to create stability in our society. We Liberals expect those who benefit from the system to support it in proportion to their benefit. We'd far rather see market reforms which would regulate the collective Capitalist enterprises while empowering individual enterprise, but we realize that it's necessary to go slow in these changes in order to avoid extreme market disruptions and give individuals time to prepare and react.