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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated

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From: Maurice Winn	4/8/2005 8:13:35 AM
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Thomas Sowell explains the meaning of "Liberal" and hence why American speakers and English speakers sometimes have trouble understanding each other. Using the same word with different meanings is always a problem and when the same word is used to have opposite meanings, it's a recipe for total failure to communicate. Americans use the word "Liberal" in a perverse way. jewishworldreview.com < The irony in all this is that the idea of designating someone else's property as a landmark and therefore making it subject to arbitrary regulation by people who pay none of the costs they create is a typical liberal idea of our time. It also shows why words like "liberal" and "conservative" have lost all relationship to the original meanings of those terms. Liberalism at one time referred to liberty, to making people as free as possible from the control of their presumed betters, and especially free of excessive control by the government. More broadly, liberals tended to favor change while conservatives defended the status quo. All that has been turned upside down. Liberals today are for preserving not only historic landmarks but also the status quo in the welfare state, obstructing the building of new housing, fighting against letting parental choice be introduced into the school system, and are digging in their heels against letting even a small fraction of Social Security be privatized. As for freedom from government controls, liberals have pushed ever more regulation of ever more details of people's homes and businesses. In some places where liberals have been politically dominant for years, you don't dare cut down a tree on your own property, even if it is about to fall over and smash your house or smash you. Whatever the merits or demerits of any of these policies, the liberal label would never fit if the word still meant what it once meant. > Mqurice the Liberal

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