printNEW COLUMN IS “Yes, The Left Stole Liberalism & Sold Out The West.” It’s now on WND and on The Unz Review.
An excerpt:
Liberals have taken to promoting socialism, which is the state-sanctioned appropriation of private property. Or, communism.
In communism’s parlance, this theft of a man’s life, labor and land is referred to as state-ownership of the means of production.
Liberals are less known for misappropriating intellectual concepts. But they do that, too.
Take the term “liberal.” It once belonged to the good guys. But socialists, communists and Fabians stole it from us.
Having originally denoted the classical liberalism of the 18th and early 19th century, “liberal” used to be a lovely word. However, to be a liberal now is to be a social democrat, a leftist, a BLM, antifa and MeToo movementarian; it’s to be Chris and Andrew Cuomo.
A French classical liberal, Benjamin Constant (1767-1830), explained what liberalism stood for:
“Individuals must enjoy a boundless freedom in the use of their property and the exercise of their labor, as long as in disposing of their property or exercising their labor they do not harm others who have the same rights.” This is the opposite of communism aka socialism.
By harm, classical liberals mean aggression, as in damage to person or property. To contemporary liberals, “harm” encompasses anything from Donald Trump’s delicious tweets to the economic competition posed by a kiddie lemonade stand.
In the UK, those in-the-know still use the word liberal in the right way. The august Economist—essential reading for, unlike American news outlets, it covers The News—has recently lamented that democracies are drifting towards “xenophobic nationalism,” and away from liberal ideas.
At the same time, the magazine allows that “liberalism is a broad church.” It mentions the “Austrians” as being among liberalism’s “forerunners”—a mention that gave me, as a devotee of economist Ludwig von Mises, the opening I needed.
So, let me ask the following:
Have the Economist’s left-liberal editorializers (excellent writers all) read what liberal extraordinaire von Mises had to say about nationalism vis-à-vis immigration?
Mises was a Jewish classical liberal in the best of traditions—a political economist second to none. He escaped the Nazis only to be treated shoddily in the American academy, by the Fabian “forerunners” of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s teachers.
Another formidable, younger classical liberal thinker is David Conway (a friend). Dr. Conway has argued most convincingly and methodically—he’s incapable of arguing any other way—that nationalism is in fact a condition for the emergence of liberalism.
To that end, Conway invokes Mises. In “Liberalism: In the Classical Tradition,” published in 1927, Mises warned that …
… READ THE REST. “Yes, The Left Stole Liberalism & Sold Out The West” is now on WND and on The Unz Review.