John Stuart Mill, one of the greatest Liberal [which is to say generous but not insane] minds ever:
“I confess I am not charmed with an ideal of life held out by those who think the normal state of human beings is that of struggling to get on; that the trampling, crushing, elbowing and treading on each others heels, which form the existing type of social life, are the most desirable lot of humankind, or anything but one of the disagreeable symptoms of one of the phases of industrial progress. . .[But] that the energies of mankind should be kept in employment by the struggle for riches as they were formerly by the struggle for war, until the better minds succeed in educating the others into better things, is undoubtedly better than that they should rust and stagnate. While minds are coarse, they require coarse stimuli, and let them have them.”
There is no doubt in my mind that Mill would today be a frustrated Republican, a frustrated Libertarian, or an ex-Democrat.