My Life as a Liberal

 

lib·er·al/ˈlib(ə)rəl/

adjective

willing to respect or accept behavior or opinions different from one’s own; open to new ideas.

relating to or denoting a political and social philosophy that promotes individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, and free enterprise.Similar:tolerantunprejudicedunbigotedbroad-mindedopen-mindedenlightenedforbearingpermissivefreefree and easyeasygoinglaissez-fairelibertarianlatitudinarianunbiasedimpartialnonpartisanindulgentlenientlaxsoftOpposite:narrow-mindedbigoted

noun

a supporter of policies that are socially progressive and promote social welfare.

a supporter of a political and social philosophy that promotes individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, and free enterprise.

The adjective liberal involves being open to, respecting, and accepting ideas and behavior different from one’s own.  This requires education.  Without education, exposure to new ideas is limited.  Wrestling with the challenges posed by new ideas is limited.  Knowledge of one’s self, and one’s place in the World is limited without education.  Education is the cornerstone of being liberal.  Without being open to new ideas, personal growth and development and the growth and development of societies is limited.

A painful lesson in the consequences of not being open to new ideas is the history of what happens when a steel-age culture with guns and trains encounters a stone-age culture with bows and arrows.  By not being open to the new idea of a written language, and preserving and maintaining traditions for tens of thousands of years, the indigenous First Nations people of North America left themselves open to being killed by the millions, and American Buffalo being killed by the millions resulting in the Indian Reservation System we have today.  Native peoples couldn’t defend themselves or their culture against the much larger more technologically sophisticated cultures with Guns, Germs, & Steel.

EDUCATION

The best education is an enlightening experience and process of facilitating learning, and the acquisition of knowledge, skills, values, morals, beliefs, habits, and personal development. Education is also transmission of cultural heritage from one generation to the next.

Education is about individual character and the character of societies as well as about scientific and technological advancement.  Life is a battle for survival.  People and societies who are the most open to all of the ideas in the World who pick and choose and adapt those ideas for their own purposes devoted to progress are more likely to survive and to defeat individuals and societies who do not do so. 

The best education has an element of reconnaissance to it.  Openness to new ideas is in part openness to the early identification of threats.  Information and its analysis allows more accurate predictions of hostility.  For example, by having highly educated and experienced software engineers and analysts, we can see the kinds of malware, ransomware, spyware, and other attacks on our infrastructure and how those attacks change and increase in sophistication.  Our defenses must account for and adapt to the attacks. We fail to do so at our peril.  Other examples include the use of sophisticated high and long flying drones with supersonic missiles that literally strike targets before the sound reaches the target.  We simply cannot afford to be so attached to traditional ways of doing things that we fail to adapt to new ideas which include new threats.

Educated people live longer, produce more, earn more, and are generally happier and more satisfied with their lives.  Educated people also tend to have educated children and grandchildren.  That is not to say that some people without education cannot achieve all of those things, they most definitely can.  The wide availability of education and correspondingly high rates of literacy tend to increase opportunities for large numbers of people.  Of course, some individuals such as actors, professional athletes, or entrepreneurs spectacularly exceed the benefits education provides for many people, but the balance of probabilities is that most people are more likely to benefit from education than from the few gateways to wealth, fame, and power available available to an immensely talented and driven few.

Therefore, policies relating to universal access to the best education for the most people based on merit without regard to sex, race, ethnicity, religion, disability are of paramount importance.  Management of costs of education and of student loans and of teacher quality matter to a liberal society.  Legacy admission not based on academic merit is anathema.  Affirmative Action admission not based on academic merit is anathema.  Access to resources to develop academic merit and breaking down of barriers to those resources is what is required so that all higher education graduates display excellence.  No unqualified or underqualified graduates based on family money or influence or lack thereof should be permitted because those seats could be filled by those with the ability and ambition to make the most of the opportunities presented.  The fact that all graduates are white anglo-saxon protestant males for example would be prima facie evidence that opportunities for others are not available.  The white male supremacy based system that created such an imbalance when “minorities” may make up more than half of the population when women and people of color are included, did not begin at the level of college admission.  It started much much earlier, and must be remedied much much earlier.  The cumulative effects of privilege over about 18 years is what produces the gap between the dominant and the dominated.  A change in admissions policies admitting less qualified people of color is a shortcut through a field of poison ivy.  It is shorter, but it results in being covered with itchy sores.  The long hard work of breaking barriers that exist before children are born and persist throughout their lives is what is required. 

I remember the pain in the voice of an African American history teacher I had in high school who graduated from Georgetown, but pronounced Constantinople as Constantinopolee.  He told us he knew he wasn’t as smart or qualified as other graduates, but that he got a free Affirmative Action Degree because it was offered with lower qualifying standard than other students had to meet.  The solution is not to admit the unqualified, it is to get more diverse people qualified.  I have good friend who is a pilot who told me how scared he was about what Affirmative Action was doing to aviation safety.  Hiring an unqualified African American pilot who lacks the proper training and experience is dangerous.  Give that pilot the opportunities to get the training and experience so we call can be safer and happier.

REDUCING INEQUALITY WITH A SOCIAL SAFETY NET

INCLUDING EDUCATION, HEALTHCARE & HOUSING

If equal access to education by those with the academic merit to make the most of educational opportunities is foundational to what it means to be liberal, and poverty, unemployment, drug addiction, crime, mass incarceration, race-based policing, behavioral health issues, and the legacy of the whites only redlining of America are interfering with that equal access resulting in college admissions skewed in favor of male WASPS (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) such that women and people of color are underrepresented based on the percentage of the population those groups, (more than half), then reducing inequality of opportunity and improving the social safety net is key to supporting the highest liberal value placed on education and opportunities for getting an education.

Scandinavian countries are known around the world for their strong social safety nets and low levels and wealth and income inequality.  Education, healthcare, and housing are rights of citizenship.  Democracies are robust and free of voter suppression based on race as is the case in the U.S..  Not surprisingly, countries like Finland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Iceland consistently rank high in personal happiness relative to other countries.

Healthcare and housing support education.  It is difficult to go through the process of getting an education if you are sick or unhoused.  These are obstacles to achieving the cornerstone value of universally available merit based education without the burden of student loans.  Every student should be allowed to get as much education as that student’s choice to use ability and ambition can get them.  Women and people of color should be encourage to get education, not discouraged in various ways under our current system.  Education should be like Juilliard.  You can’t pay.  You earn your way in and earn your way out.  It doesn’t matter if you don’t have shoes.

PROTECTING THE ENVIRONMENT & WORKERS

Education, healthcare, housing, and relatively low wealth and income inequality aren’t much use if climate change makes the world increasing less habitable for humans and low wages, union busting, and dangerous conditions, make work increasingly miserable for many people. The world needs large numbers of people who do not have higher education.  Higher education can serve to make workers less satisfied because they are underemployed and have higher aspirations for themselves.

So, society should both encourage education for those who want it, and not judge those who don’t.   People who do not attain high levels of education but work hard and are honest are a credit to society.  They are the backbone of society.  Without them, we would just be a blob of goo on the floor with a head reading and thinking as we starved to death.

The Earth itself supports all life (with help from the Sun).  If a person is in a coma on life support we wouldn’t play around unplugging the ventilator for a few minutes to see what happens, or slowing the IV fluid or feeding tube to see if it makes a difference.  You just don’t play around with a person’s life support.  It is not a joke.  They literally need it to live.  Yet, that is what we do to ourselves and our planet.  Sometimes what we inflict on ourselves is much worse that what we would tolerate from others.  If some alien civilization was pumping carbon into our atmosphere and increasing greenhouse gasses to degrade our climate, the world would mobilise and unify in opposition.  However, since we are doing it to ourselves the alarm bells are heard by many people, but not everyone and we slowly work toward reduction.  Undoing the harm we have already done and returning the climate and the Earth to what it once was before we maimed it is not even considered as a possibility.  Only slowing the rate of harm is discussed.  Only slowing population growth or slowing economic growth is discussed.  The idea that we have too many people to support with a fossil-fuel economy making baby steps toward renewable energy is apparently unthinkable and unstated.  Reducing population size and the size of economies and the militaries supported by those economies is sacrilege.

Saying so is heresy akin to what used to get people burned at the stake.  Today, you would just be cancelled rather than incinerated alive,  but it is metaphorically similar.

So, yes, I do believe that liberal means smaller government, but not in the sense of a smaller social safety net.  I think it means smaller government in proportion to a smaller population, economy, military, and empire.  Smaller in a liberal sense means less intrusive into personal matters relating to sexuality, abortion, raising children, and religion. Smaller means more tightly focused on the well being of the majority of citizens.  If we lived by Adam Smith’s definition of the Wealth of Nations being the standard of living of the majority of citizens and the ability to recreate that standard again and again, I think we would be better off.  How most people live, and how their children, and grandchildren live, should be the standard by which we measure ourselves.  Doing so would preclude military empire deficit spending which threatens the standard of living of present and future Americans.

INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS, CIVIL LIBERTIES, DEMOCRACY, & FREE ENTERPRISE

These values can sometimes conflict with a strong social safety net, low wealth and income inequality, and merit based non-exclusionary access to education.  All three of those values run counter to male WASP supremacy.  Protecting workers, policing fraud and corruption, filling in the holes in Capitalism which creates and maintains a permanent underclass does conflict with individual wealth creation to some degree.
The individual right to do as one wishes with one’s land and the air and water adjacent to that land is limited by government agencies such as the EPA.  Individual rights and civil liberties are limited by everyone else’s individual rights and civil liberties.  The value of a vote is increased when the number of votes cast is decreased creating an incentive for voter suppression, which is alive and well in America today and not limited to the literacy tests and poll taxes of decades past.  Free enterprise is limited by the SEC and the FTC.
To be liberal means to weigh and balance these competing values and to keep searching in order find optimal policies to strike and preserve balance.  For example, protection of the Spotted Owl in Oregon does have an economic impact on the logging industry.  The conflict is real and can be heated.  An editorial in the Oregonian said, “I love Spotted Owls; they taste like chicken.”  Protesters sometimes chain themselves to trees to attempt to prevent cutting down of trees.  Getting all of the information and making conscious, informed, public policy choices regarding preserving an endangered species and mitigating harm to loggers and the logging industry is necessary and important.  Some government assistance to mitigate harm would be appropriate.  These are difficult decisions that require open minds that are not overly prejudiced and are tolerant.
I was heartened by the testimony of Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve Chair who was a proponent of the philosophy of Ayn Rand and believed that government had no role in policing fraud and corruption in capital markets.  He said he was wrong.  Lack of government oversight is what allowed the orgy of greed that created the worldwide economic collapse of 2007.  Unfortunately, it does not appear that we have learned from our own history and continue to have a multi-trillion dollar opaque derivatives market even larger than we did before 2007.
I used to wonder why we can’t learn from experiences like Vietnam and repeat them in Afghanistan and Iraq.  I don’t wonder anymore now that a leaked recording of President Biden has him explaining that he learned from Nixon that we can pull out and leave those who supported us behind to be tortured and killed and there is nothing anyone can do about it.  We did learn.  We just learned the wrong lesson.  We are like Jesse Pinkman in Breaking Bad who comes out of Rehab and says he learned his lesson, which was “I am a bad guy.”  That is not the lesson rehabilitation from drug addiction seeks to teach, but it was the message received by Mr. Pinkman and by Uncle Sam.
Free Enterprise Capitalism the the most powerful economic engine yet devised in the history of the World practiced in various forms even in Communist Countries such as China and Russia.  No other system can compete with the wealth building of free people seeking to maximize profit.

Unfettered Capitalism is hellish and practiced by no nation on Earth.  Irish laborers coming to America as ballast in ships blown up by dynamite building railroads were cast aside for more Irish immigrants because slaves were to valuable to be abused in that fashion.  Chinese rail workers died or were maimed and were replaced by more Chinese workers.  The environment had no protection from coal burning and buried and dumped waster.  Unemployed workers had to protection.  The elderly had no protection, nor did the disabled.  Women and people of color were denied access to all that should have been their as tax paying citizens.  Fraudulent investment scams were rampant.  Robbery and cattle rustling were common.  Now ransomware is common.  Human Nature is not changed by technology, it is just expressed differently.

No rational person can argue that Government does not have a role in protecting and managing these harms.  Every civilized Country does so in some manner to some degree.  The issue is what is the cost benefit analysis of government regulation.  When do regulation and taxes strangle business and initiative and when do they promote entrepreneurship and investment in research and development and improvement of good and services.  What tax rates are too high and why?  What tax rates are too low and why?  What regulation is to much and why?  What regulation is too little and why?

Getting the right amount of tax and regulation requires an open mind, tolerance to different ideas, public debate, and effort in reaching compromises.  That is what liberal means to me and why it is important for the world.