Why are the Liberal Democrats not called the Illiberal Democrats if they are not liberals either? Maybe they should be called the Lino party, as in liberal in name only.
– Commenter Chris H
|
|||||
|
We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people. Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house] Authors
Arts, Tech & CultureCivil LibertiesCommentary
EconomicsSamizdatistas |
Samizdata quote of the dayApril 9th, 2009 |
 7 comments to Samizdata quote of the day |
Who Are We?The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling. We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe. CategoriesArchivesFeed This PageLink Icons   |
|||
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
|||||
It’s fairly simple, as detailed in Yes Minister you get rid of the difficult stuff in the name. So if you’re not liberal, but want to appear as if you are, you put it in the name of your party. So if a political party has “Liberal”in the name, you know that they’re anything but. Much like if you saw a country whose name was the People’s Democratic Republic of Somewhereistan, you knew right off that it’s a communist dictatorship.
I nominate Edward’s comment for SQOTD 🙂
I think the name “Socialist Lite Party” was taken.
So thanks to Mr. King I now have my answer, obvious really. I used to ride an MZ motorbike, one of the few fairly good products to come out of Communist Europe, The fuel cap bore the claim that it was “Made in the German Democratic Republic” and I used to think that presumably the population of East Germany were unaware that in order to qualify as democratic a country had to hold free elections with more than one kind of candidate, I mean who did they think they were fooling?
Actually I’m not sure if the name liberal originally meant generous or progressive as being the antithesis of conservative, the original Liberal party is quite old.
The only name for a political party that shouldn’t engender a lawsuit for fraud would the “The Lying Bastages.” Concerns about any lesser form of mislabeling is just quibbling.
In English the word “liberal” is indeed just as connected to such words as “liberality” (being flexible and generious) as it is “liberty”. Even in my 1911 dictionary a “liberal” interpretation of the American Constititution is a statist one (giving wide powers to the Feds) – and this was not new, it was the same back in the early 19th century with the American Whigs. Meanwhile some British Whigs were supporters of state education, and state control of …….
And even in the 19th century there were plenty of liberals (in Britian and other places) who wanted a bigger government (in size and scope) in many areas.
Sometimes the term “Classical Liberal” is used to describe a liberal who wants a smaller government.
However, the “Economist” magazine (on the wickipedia entry that its staff write for it) describes itself as a supporter of “Classical Liberalism”.
This would be “Classical Liberalism” in the sense of the ever expanding Welfare State (destroying what is left of Civil Society), “gun control”, and taxpayer bailouts for banks and other large corporations.
This is the problem with terms – they get stolen.
If such an thing as the “Economist” can call itself a supporter of “Classical Liberalism” then the term becomes worthless.
I was always given to understand that LINO stood for Low Income No ‘Ope – something used to describe miners in the mid-1980’s.