As I feel it worth pointing out from time to time, I use Liberalism in its historical form, of desiring as much liberty for people as is possible. Liberty, liberal, and, in my view, the word for life are all related. Self evidently, what goes by that name currently is anything but liberating. Those under the thrall of this doctrine believe in using the regulatory power of the government to engineer society, which necessarily results in unwarranted restrictions in economic and political liberty.
Anyway, that was just a clarification.
The point I wanted to make is that liberty can in some respects be treated as a commodity. Specifically, one can posit that the demand for liberty goes up as cultural diversity increases. Many of the little wars around the world amount to one group of people wanting to live their own way, who have taken up arms to free themselves from some other group.
The more liberty you want, the higher the price (the higher the demand, the more costly the supply). If you are content to let others make most of your decisions, then you don’t have to work much. If you want you and your community to make most fundamental decisions, then you have to get it done.
The cost of absolute liberty is death, since if you want the freedom to kill others, you shall be killed yourself. Note, too, that this death can be moral–I have often spoken of hard-core leftists as “moral suicides”–in that moral death some people pay for the “liberty” of being enslaved. This is a psychological malady of the sort Rousseau talked about. It is the outcome of being so ungenerative as to be unable to form a coherent code for governing oneself, and therefore seeking release from freedom.
The cost of to liberty of order within a political system rises with the immorality of the people, and falls with their capacity to rationally govern themselves.
Liberalism, then, is a political implementation of basic economics as applied to the mass forces which govern behavior. As I have often said, the operative metaphors are Smith’s Invisible Hand, and Hayek’s Extended Order.
The essence of Liberalism is breaking things down to localized orders to the extent practical. Some look back romantically on the countless diverse Medieval towns–around the world–which has so many local customs, festivals, ways of dressing, etc. I want a return to this much more interesting way of living, consisting in genuine diversity.
As a general rule, you can look up the antonym of any word a leftist uses, and from that discern their true intent. George Soros wants a closed society. Those who agitate for diversity want absolute cultural conformity, and hide this by pretending that race and sexual “Identity” alone constitutes culture. In reality, the most important cultural differences historically have always been religious. They want to end religion. They want to end moral distinctions of all sorts, more generally, in favor of political correctness, which is in fact nothing more or less than the demand for conformity to doctrines originating with elites.
They want to clone ideas, and propagate them flawlessly, eventually across the entire planet. This is anti-Liberal, anti-humanistic, and by my definition anti-moral, since as I have argued proper moral decisions are always LOCAL, imperfect, and necessary.