Saturday, February 13, 2010
I used to believe I was a Liberal (work in progress)
I used to believe I was a liberal, in the modern American sense of the word. One thing I can give Obama credit for is helping me realize that I’m not liberal like he is, but really “Classically Liberal”, or more commonly, “Libertarian”. I believe there are a lot of people out there, especially young people, who identify as liberals but don’t even realize (or want to admit) that at the core of their values they’re really libertarians (my brother included). In our increasingly polarized political environment there are a number of things that get in the way of more young people realizing that their own “liberal” beliefs are in fact consistent with libertarian thought:
Many self-identify with the word “Liberal”
The word “Liberal” itself is something that, even for me, is hard to let go of. In my college days, which started way back in 2000, proclaiming oneself as “Liberal” became for many much like proclaiming oneself as intelligent, or caring, especially after the invasion of Iraq. Then it became like a badge of honor; a sign that you didn’t buy into the corrupt George W. Bush, war-mongering agenda. Regardless of how us youth may or may not have misunderstood the situation, hating George Bush and calling oneself a “liberal” felt natural and good. While I was and still am against the Iraq war, this article is not the place for me to make judgment calls on the decision to go to war there. My point is that I believe that the psychological attachment to the idea of being “Liberal” blinds many young people to the true modern American meaning of the word. The word itself comes from the Latin Liber, meaning “Free”, and is naturally associated with such notions of freedom. It is a word that feels good (as it should), because we know what it means, if only because we know what “liberation” is. Classical Liberalism is older and, in fact, a far more freedom-oriented political ideology than Modern Liberalism will ever be. Only in the modern United States has the term “liberal” come to mean something that is entirely antithetical to freedom: Statism. Today I still waver when asked if I have, in fact, become a Conservative. “No, I’m a Libertarian!” I tend to respond. While I find myself against all that Modern American Liberals stand for, I have a strong psychological attachment to the term Liberal, and in some sense, a bit of a bad feeling about the term Conservative, which sounds so inherently old, historical, and backward-looking. It is time, I believe, to rethink our concepts of Liberalism. Barack Obama, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and countless others, today’s Modern American “Liberals”, seemingly have little regard for freedom, as the term liberal might imply. As Mark Levin has pointed out, they are in fact, more accurately called Statists. And we should call them none other than that. Only when America truly comes to understand Liberalism vs. Statism will Freedom triumph over the Tyranny of the Left.
The Right has a bad reputation.
The two-party system puts every constituency on one or the other side. Incidentally, most Democrats support bigger government, more regulation, or the Welfare State, ideas that are contrary to Libertarian thought, so Libertarians end up on the right. Libertarians get lumped in with what the left perceives as an impressionable mass of uneducated, socially conservative, backward-looking bigots, and the greedy, soulless Capitalists who want nothing more than to influence government to make them all the more wealthy. Intellectualism seems contrary to any association with the right to most intellectuals. Few are aware of the intellectual history that embodies Austrian Economics, Libertarianism, and indeed, Classical Liberalism. .
Free Market Capitalism is wholly misunderstood.
Many believe that Capitalism is an economic system set up by the rich to exploit the masses. What many believe to be the negative effects of a free market are really the negative effects of government and private enterprise working together.
Most people do not have a true understanding of real-life economic s.
Many understand economics on an academic level, through models, graphs, formulas, and ratios. It is entirely another thing to be able to look at the world and understand that virtually everything we do is an economic decision that affects the reality of what we call “the economy”. I don’t believe this understanding is something that can be taught. I didn’t major in Economics. I took one college Economics class and I think I got a B-. For me, an understanding of “real-life” economics arose from a slow realization about the meaning of prices. I traded a lot of stock options as a hobby for about a year when I was about 26 and 27 years old. After several losing streaks, winning streaks, and more losing streaks in the fall of 2008, I had successfully learned that trading options requires a lot more time than I had to devote to it. While I lost money, I gained something that I now consider far more important - a true understanding of the psychological nature of prices. I had stared at stock and options prices for as much time as I could at my day job, scanned the internet for news on various companies and the market, and watched far too much CNBC. Frankly, the market volatility of 2007 and 2008 was absolutely fascinating to me. What fascinated me and drew me in further was the realization that the various numbers, charts, figures, and especially prices, were real-time, real-life reflections of collective human psychology. It was buying and selling, which we all do in some form or other, and the prices were literally reflections of human behavior. Almost immediately I realized the human nature of all prices in a free market. I came to understand that “markets” are not made of a few rich people and some Wall Street traders, but all of us. Virtually every human on Earth is part of a market. One need not trade stocks or options to realize this. Many do just through other normal life experiences, while some never will understand it.
The economic realities I learned as a very amateur options trader helped me understand the folly of Barack Obama’s rhetoric early on in his campaign. Coming out of my Bush-hating college years, I found Obama to be a breath of fresh air. However, in early 2008, Obama said some things that blew my mind.
I think nearly every American believes in and supports personal freedom. The reality I came to understand is that personal freedom and economic freedom are literally the same thing.
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