Little-Acorn
11-05-2012, 11:35 PM
As several have pointed out here, "liberal" originally meant "supporting liberty". This is what Friedman means when he calls himself a "liberal". That started to change in the first half of the 1900s when Woodrow Wilson and the two Roosevelts started making laws forcing people to restrict their economic and business activities, and has gotten to the point today where modern "liberals" are more accurately called "totalitarian socialists". Now, when someone says he is a liberal, it's necessary to ask whether he means the original, classical liberal or today's modern totalitarians. The two kinds are completely different from each other.
"Conservative" is actually a term of derision coined by the big-govt people of the early 1900s. Until that time, government had always been a minor function that mostly dealt with other nations, prosecuted criminals, and set measurement and monetary standards. It mostly stayed out of people's private lives and economies unless major wars threatened.
But then the people who wanted bigger, more intrusive government started showing up more and more. Normal people who wanted it to stay small and unimportant in ordinary afffairs, were denigrated as being "afraid to change", and wanting to keep government the same simply for that reason, instead of the truth that they had realized that giving govt power to dictate people's lives was destructive. So they were derisively called "conservative", instead of the more correct "restricted government advocates" they actually were. And the same people are called the same thing to this day.
So "liberal" has undergone a radical transformation, from what it once meant to what it means today; while "conservative" has not changed in a hundred years.
P.S. Some people point to the Republican party as an example of what "conservatives" think and do. But the fact is that many Republicans (including GWB, Romney, Gingrich etc.) are strange mixes of conservative and modern-liberal. The best that can be said for them is that they are not 100% totalitarian socialists, unlike most major members of today's Democrat party.
"Conservative" is actually a term of derision coined by the big-govt people of the early 1900s. Until that time, government had always been a minor function that mostly dealt with other nations, prosecuted criminals, and set measurement and monetary standards. It mostly stayed out of people's private lives and economies unless major wars threatened.
But then the people who wanted bigger, more intrusive government started showing up more and more. Normal people who wanted it to stay small and unimportant in ordinary afffairs, were denigrated as being "afraid to change", and wanting to keep government the same simply for that reason, instead of the truth that they had realized that giving govt power to dictate people's lives was destructive. So they were derisively called "conservative", instead of the more correct "restricted government advocates" they actually were. And the same people are called the same thing to this day.
So "liberal" has undergone a radical transformation, from what it once meant to what it means today; while "conservative" has not changed in a hundred years.
P.S. Some people point to the Republican party as an example of what "conservatives" think and do. But the fact is that many Republicans (including GWB, Romney, Gingrich etc.) are strange mixes of conservative and modern-liberal. The best that can be said for them is that they are not 100% totalitarian socialists, unlike most major members of today's Democrat party.