It took me some time to realize that I was a liberal. I called myself centrist, a left-leaning moderate. But knew I wasn’t a Goldwater conservative, and I had problems with progressives. Their PC strictures seemed to go against free speech.
Then I reread the Declaration of Independence and some of the Constitution as well. That brought me to the conclusion that I was what I call a Preamble-Liberal.
Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness seems a pretty good trio of legs for a stool that a liberal can sit on.
The Constitution expands on the rights we have as Americans.
Looking at those two documents, I argue that the patriotism they imply is a liberal one.
In part of my view is colored by a degree and post graduate work in Economics.
In that world socialism and capitalism are clearly defined by how the means of production are controlled.
A separate issue is whether and how we provide a safety net for our citizens and other residents.
I see this as a philosophical issue that stems from the concept of public goods, and how that concept highlights a failing of unbridled free-market capitalism.
Common examples of public goods are clean air and potable water.
I have lived in the greater Los Angeles since early childhood. I experienced smog first hand in grade school when, on some days at recess, it hurt to take a deep breath.
Our air is much cleaner now due to government regulations.
There was no way that problem would have been solved by free-market capitalism.
We had to cast a wide net of regulations and taxes to pull this off.
But what we did was not socialism. Instead, we saved a public good from ruin by providing a safety net.
Safety net strategies are related to political and economic strategies. But they are different and deserve their own forum.
Good observations but considering the urgency of the moment the Oligarchy is stronger than ever. Change will come at a high cost . Even change back to a more classical liberal framework is looking like a stretch . We can start by resisting authoritarian government . Governors and mayors of big cities need to take a stand against the tyranny of the federal government and defend their citizens and their rights. Liberals will have to throw their rule book in the trash bin because the oligarchs and their minions don’t follow the rules.
"In 1962 I was a Conservative. I believed privilege could only be justified by service, high taxes on very high incomes were necessary to prevent an entrepreneurial economy becoming a rentier economy, and Keynesian growth would finance public service improvements and a welfare state that steadily reduced inequality. I was suspicious of ideologically driven, large-scale change. These were the mainstream policies of the Macmillan government at the time. In 60 years I have moved from centre right to hard left without changing my opinions."
"Like Stephen Watkins, I have hardly changed my political opinions since I was a young man. I was a social democrat, then - a person who believed in pragmatic solutions to real-world problems and who was willing to go out to look for them and who believed that markets had a role, but so did the state.
Who believed that finding the right balance between the two was the thing that was necessary to achieve wellbeing for everyone to the greatest possible degree in society.
Who believed that the state had a duty to care for those whom the market had failed.
Who believed the state had a duty to care for the planet when there was no one else to act as its representative.
Those things do not make you hard left. They make you a decent human being."
I have been painted with the same brush. Explaining if I was a socialist so were our founders who established the postal service, fire fighters, police, libraries as social programs. I lean progressive but support capitalism with safeguards. I have been on the " Tea Party Ship" Several times. Sometimes the best way to express your anger is to throw their tea (money) into a harbor.
Lol oh Mike. I disagree with you so much, and yet I do love your writing, and much of what you have to say. It's comforting knowing that's possible in these difficult times.
You make a good point viz a viz the distinction between the "classically liberal" American Republic of our historical mythos (a view which, I hasten to add, I think is very important, even if I think it's broadly fictional in many important ways), and the current, dreadful, oligarchic, pseudo-historical "American Republic" that is being created by contemporary American fascists. And you also make a number of great points in your delineation between genuine "SOCIALISM" (that big, scary word for many Americans) and the left-libertarian, Rawlsian kind of Republic you're envisioning.
But here's the big elephant in the room: what makes you think that this current devolution into fascism is anything other than the inevitable, logical conclusion of the bourgeois democracy you long to return to? Yes, oligarchs have captured the media; the public, political discourse; the culture; they have warped public perceptions through disinformation and made civil discourse virtually impossible. Look at the rest of the western world and behold: the same process is playing out there, too. It hasn't happened as quickly; and the manifestations of reactionary ideology, and ultimately fascism, have been far less vulgar. But what if this is simply what always happens, so long as our society is wedded to capitalism?
Capitalism is an addiction, Mike. Capitalism is addiction to the dream of individual, unimaginable wealth. It's an addiction to the idea that one person SHOULD be able to change the entire world, all on their own, without the consent or input of their community and peers. And it's killing us; it's killing our standards of living; it's killing our planet. Capitalism is like heroin; you're trying to tell us, "no! It doesn't have to be this way! If we just get the rules right, we can control our addiction!" No, we can't, Mike. Capitalism has led us to this place, and it will always lead us back here.
Capitalism did its job; it helped our civilization evolve, like Feudalism and Mercantilism before it. And now, it's time, at long last, for us to surrender it; to let it go. We can be socialists but still believe in private markets in the domains of extraneous commodities. We can refuse to allow billionaires without allowing for a healthy level of social stratification and relative differences of wealth. What we absolutely cannot do, is continue to make the same mistakes over and over again, because we're desperate to get back to an idealized past that never was.
I think you’re raising the most important challenge any defender of liberal democracy has to confront: what if fascism isn’t an aberration but the natural entropy of capitalism itself?
Where we differ, I think, is that I don’t see “capitalism” as a single moral agent with teleology. I see it as a set of tools for coordinating human activity under the rule of law. The question isn’t whether markets exist—they always will in some form—but whether they’re embedded in a framework that disciplines power and protects human dignity.
Democratic socialism, in the sense most people mean it, isn’t the opposite of liberal democracy—it’s one of its evolutionary stages. If you accept private property, rule of law, constitutional government, and markets for goods and labor, you’re still in the liberal tradition. You’re just emphasizing the social dimension of liberty: that people need material security and equality of opportunity to exercise freedom meaningfully.
That’s why I often say democratic socialists are confused liberals. They’re not wrong about the failures of capitalism—but those failures come not from markets per se, but from the erosion of liberal constraints on concentrated power. The problem isn’t too much capitalism; it’s capitalism without democracy.
Liberalism, properly understood, is the only framework that’s ever been able to contain capitalism’s excesses without lapsing into authoritarian control. The task isn’t to abolish markets but to re-embed them in moral and civic institutions—to make them serve human flourishing rather than the other way around.
You’re right that the idealized republic never fully existed. But ideals matter precisely because they’re aspirational—they give us a moral horizon to steer toward. The cure for liberal failure isn’t post-liberalism; it’s better liberalism.
I don't entirely agree, but I agree with you enough, and enjoy your writing enough, that I don't want to argue any further. I appreciate your thoughtful engagement with what I said.
Um, no, we cannot be socialists and still believe in private markets. Socialism, by definition, is public ownership of the means of production. There's one little problem with Marxism; it has never existed. Socialist revolutions are always hijacked by authoritarians.
Socialism maybe, but not politics pursued by Social Democrats. We do have private ownership and no entusiasm to put everything into state ownership. There are many similarities between Social Democrats and Liberals about the end state of a society. What differs is: How do we get there? Social Democrats believe in maximizing taxes and distribute the surplus to needing citizens. It's been tried in Sweden up until the end of the 70's - it didn't work. Being part of the EU and the international capital market has taught Social Democrats they can not stray too far from the centre, which I believe is good. However,whenever there is a problem with private alternatives the panacea is always "more state control, deprivatize schools or health care". Social Democrats conveniently forget the waiting times when health care was indeed run only by regions or the status ot the schooling system with only public providers. Like Mike said, capitalism is not the problem, the rules governing capitalism are nonlogical, weak and not very longterm. This hurts the visionary entrepreneur and benefit short term rent seekers.
“Public ownership of the means of production” is admits of multiple interpretations you rube; some of them make no allowance whatsoever for private ownership, others do. The Nordic countries are all democratic and socialist. Also, Marxism is not equivalent with socialism. Finally, as I mentioned in my original comment, the global trend of capitalist countries is towards fascism, so this pathetic, knee-jerk “SOCIALISM BAD LOL” bullshit is for the birds.
Market socialism is a type of economic system involving social ownership of the means of production within the framework of a market economy. It has the word "market" in the name, but the means of production are publicly owned. The Makhnovist control over a region of Ukraine was brought to an end when the Red Army invaded Ukraine in January 1920,
My understanding is that what differentiates market socialism from central planning, even if in both cases the rent of capital is taken for public rather than private use, is that the former relies on price signals while the latter does not, and hence it operates in a market framework.
As for Makhnovism, my point there was that it was an attempt to create an anarcho-communist society that failed not because of internal hijacking by authoritarians but external conquest by authoritarians. Would it have worked? Maybe not (I personally doubt that it would), but it wasn't even given a real chance before it was crushed.
Welcome to the socialists- they are the only people in American politics who share your analysis and immediate goals. It's nice of you to join us here, but I'm not sure why you are so insistent on not being one of us.
There is a liberal case for limiting excessive inequalities in wealth: these can undermine the very social basis of a liberal society. Classical liberalism was based on the understanding that elites might use their power to rewrite social rules to their advantage. Adam Smith famously wrote:
“The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order ought always to be listened to with great precaution… It comes from an order of men whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.” — Wealth of Nations, Bk I, ch. XI.
I am way out of my depth here, BUT, the original foundation of American democracy was amongst the thirteen colonies. Jefferson himself wanted to see successive countries founded as part of the western settlement wave of mad, land grabbing destiny.
I don't believe such a democratic ideal is scalable onto the platform of the nation-states we have become today. When we try, we lose our foundational hold on a manageable/sustainable place.
I am a bioregionalist, living in the land of falling waters called Cascadia, verses the corporatized version called the Pacific Northwest.
Once we blow out the integral and social health of regional identity in its comprehensive composition of watersheds and ecoregions, there is no common sense of boundary left, and then like a cancer, political affiliation grows rampant to the utter ruin of all sustainable life on the planet. We live in watersheds, not nation-states! Or hasn't anyone noticed?!
We can loose a nation-state world and still survive, but without watershed viability, there is no life, at least of planet Earth. Is there anywhere else we can adjourn to?
The complexities of markets, capital, and world wide technologies today are more a distraction than a cause of our political dysfunction. We are living beyond our scale, and any talk about solutions on the level of nations, let alone in relation to the global consumer-manufacturing transportation economy is lunacy, without the moonshine!
As a liberal socialist, I agree with most of your analysis but not with your self-identification. Classical liberalism has always been too deferential to property rights, with the result that people like Nozick and Rothbard are treated as legimitate participants in the liberal tradition, rather than as enemies and/or cranks.
In an economy characterised by lots of public goods and economies of size, breaking up monopolies doesn't work. They inevitably reform and can afford advocates to resist further attempts to control them (Chicago revolution in anti-trust). Public ownership (or, if this can;t be done, regulation so tight as to amount to the same thing) is the only solution.
“The structures they built are being systematically circumvented by people who have the resources to work around constitutional constraints.” Indeed. I might add, the structures were built with an assumption that future leaders would be men of honour.
So many are so brainwashed your very reasonable arguments cannot compute in their heads. Bless you for being capable of nuanced understanding of the world around you.
As I've said before, I think getting out of this will in part require a reevaluation of what constitutes economic capital and what constitutes economic land, that is, "that value which is the creation of the community".
"The tax upon land values is, therefore, the most just and equal of all taxes. It falls only upon those who receive from society a peculiar and valuable benefit, and upon them in proportion to the benefit they receive. It is the taking by the community, for the use of the community, of that value which is the creation of the community. It is the application of the common property to common uses. When all rent is taken by taxation for the needs of the community, then will the equality ordained by Nature be attained. No citizen will have an advantage over any other citizen save as is given by his industry, skill, and intelligence; and each will obtain what he fairly earns. Then, but not till then, will labor get its full reward, and capital its natural return." (Henry George, "Poverty and Progress")
Michael Hudson neatly describes oligarchy as the counter-revolution of neoliberalism against liberalism, and "socialism" as societal control of economic rules. Several authors have spoken directly to the democratization of corporations as the key to correcting wealth inequality. Once a thriving family business goes public, it needs to have community oversight, lest greedy manipulators again take the upper hand. Those are always lurking, craving advantage over community well-being.
I would be less concerned with a growing family businesses, than with the depredations of Wall St. Hedge funds have been gutting the middle class for decades by buying and stripping businesses of wealth, playing games in financial markets that often end in crisis, forcing taxpayers to pay for the bailouts, while they keep their profits, buying up housing and renting it for profit to the same people who would otherwise own it, buying land, particularly farm land, to control the food supply, and generally gutting the wealth of the nation for their personal gain. There are fundamentally two kinds of oligarchical billionaires; high tech entrepreneurs, who earned their wealth, and hedge fund CEOs and their minions, who are predators.
Tech entrepreneurs "earned" their wealth in the sense that they were willing to take massive losses to drive out competition (or just by buying that competition; anyone remember Google Video? And how it eventually got shut down after Google bought YouTube in what was arguably anticompetitive market consolidation?) and then engage in extortionate monopolistic practices to extract excessive rents.
I was thinking of the ones who actually earned their wealth, rhrough innovation and risk-taking, like Paul Allen, but you're right anyway. I also forgot the oil billionaires in my comment, who profit from exploiting natural resources.
Microsoft only avoided being broken up under antitrust scrutiny by agreeing to a pile of consent decrees (and really should have been broken up; that case more or less heralded the era of not meaningfully enforcing antitrust which has been a major contributor to the current state of affairs).
Allen got rich off of monopolistic rent extraction.
As for oil billionaires, I will just wave a hand in the direction of Norway.
The "Word" has so much value, but it also can be a distraction from getting closer to the "truth."
"Rent-seekers, or rent-seeking," "classical liberalism," and even "moderation" are becoming incomprehensible to me- and I am not sure all these terms tossed out in an air of academic highbrow really serve a purpose. Let me explain.
Through man's history, from Biblical stories of Cain & Abel, there has been this basic or primitive side to man to acquire, to get, to consume. And, there never seems to be enough, so that you hear phrases such as
"The rich get richer, while the poor stay poor"
"Those with the gold make the rules."
Throughout the annals of humankind (sic), we have the prince and the pauper, the Kings and the Serfs, The Hollywood "Rich and Famous" who despite all their extreme wealth appear on just about every advertisement, acquiring still more.
We have popular TV series like Downton Abbey, portraying the absurd wealth and pampering of the ultrarich. And we have the reality of the monarchy in the UK, living in palaces and having, upon their demise, funerals costing more than the net worth of 1,000 "ordinary" people.
All of us have seen and experienced this. A rich uncle of mine would give me an occasional dime, as if it were a deed of great generosity. The poor or moderately wealthy man would tip me 3-5x more than the wealthy professional. In my own profession, I have seen medicine devolve to where the "name of the game" was physician income >> patient outcome. And poster boys for this are in our midst from Musk, to Trump to all the other billionaires that work hard to figure a way to spend their money. There are exceptions like the Gates who are philanthropic.
Our heavily referred to Founding Fathers were steeped in the reading of Plato, where in The Republic, and Charmides the concept of "moderation" is focused. Plato's "moderation" was more than simple self-restraint but rather a fundamental state of Harmony and Order-what we currently are blatantly lacking in the US. Moderation, for Plato, controlled the Appetitive part of the soul and ensured that one's desires did not lead to excess or chaos.
If you read the magnificent work of Dee Hock in The Birth of a Chaordic Age, he expounds on the sickness that pervades our current society:
Ego, Envy, Ambition, and Avarice. What Hock advises is that ego, envy, avarice and ambition (opportunism) must be replaced with Humility, Benevolence*, Altruism, and Magnanimity. Some terms should be defined with the hope of agreement:
Opportunism: a style of human behavior, opportunism has the connotation of a lack of integrity, or doing something that is out of character (inconsistent). The underlying thought is that the price of the unrestrained pursuit of selfishness is behavioral inconsistency. Thus, opportunism involves compromising some or other principles normally upheld. Thus, substantively, opportunism refers to the acting on opportunities in a self-interested, biased or one-sided manner that conflicts or contrasts in some way with one or more general rule, law, norm, or principle. (Wikipedia)
Benevolence: willingness to act to benefit others
Magnanimity: taking actions for noble purposes
If we as a global society, or at the very least as a melting pot of peoples, value such traits over acquisition of stuff, then we need to act and expend effort to achieve such a Republic.
I tend to think we will not have Midterms due to the GOP's devious nature and apparent lack of any moral fiber. Others I know feel we will have Midterms and currently the GOP will be victorious, at least in the Senate. Nothing short of a Democratic majority in all Congress would be satisfactory to me if there is a tiny chance to begin restoration of this crippled country.
This is where I feel our efforts should be. Fixing all other pathologies would follow the goal of restoring sanity to the rules and regulations of governance. What's the point of all other mental masturbation? All it does is create enmity. Those who need to be awakened need more basic talk about human values, about legacy for our children and grandchildren, about vision that will give us any hope of human unity (humanity). First things first.
A true conservative in the old days was someone who cared most about values. Now the far right calls them liberals. You're so right, labels mean nothing, really.
Let me slightly expand on your reply above since this topic is so important and yet so few comments have been made. Years ago, 1993 to be exact, I was involved in describing the tenets of a new organization focused on patient empowerment. It was funny, but so many of the items selected started with the letter "c."
Choices
Cooperation
Concentration of Effort
Communication
Compassion
Centers
Charity
To this, I would add caring.
But what the above did not touch on is a realization that underscoring all that we humans do to each other, to this planet, and in essence to all biotic and abiotic presentations of life, must be strongly anchored in one unifying concept: Integrity. The "integrity" I speak of goes beyond what most people think of hearing this word. I hope the short paragraph below is fully understandable in its philosophical content. I did not invent this, it is a spirituality that has been shared over a span of thousands of years. If you wish to read/understand this within some incredible, beautiful writing, then read "Mountaineering in Scotland" by W.H. Murray. The title belies the magnificence, the profundity of what Murray expressed in his first non-fiction work. Here's the "bit" about Integrity.
All life (bios) is directed towards unity-- oneness. All interactions have an end-game: balance and interconnectivity, from the structure and function of the solar system to that of an ant colony. The nature of our solar system recreates itself in the structure of an atom, with a central nucleus containing protons surrounded by electrons in their orbital shells. Each particle interacts with all other particles; it is a dynamic network. An ant colony has the same structure with the queen at the core or nucleus of the colony, and various ants acting in different capacities to serve the entity and maintain the unity of the colony. All of humankind's behavior, both political, societal and biological exhibits a similar macrocosm built upon a series of progressively smaller microcosms, which upon further inspection, are themselves found to be the macrocosm upon which another such series can be discerned. The interactions that occur within a human being at a cellular level strive for oneness or integrity, like a solar system, an atomic molecule or an ant colony. Everything is Oneness.
American politicians and much of the population have lost any appreciation for integrity, how much we need it, and its value to future life on this planet. An extraordinary author who has devoted his life to this subject in all kinds of manifestations is Wendell Berry, a 91-year old Kentuckian. Do yourself a great favor and pick up "What Are People For."
It took me some time to realize that I was a liberal. I called myself centrist, a left-leaning moderate. But knew I wasn’t a Goldwater conservative, and I had problems with progressives. Their PC strictures seemed to go against free speech.
Then I reread the Declaration of Independence and some of the Constitution as well. That brought me to the conclusion that I was what I call a Preamble-Liberal.
Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness seems a pretty good trio of legs for a stool that a liberal can sit on.
The Constitution expands on the rights we have as Americans.
Looking at those two documents, I argue that the patriotism they imply is a liberal one.
In part of my view is colored by a degree and post graduate work in Economics.
In that world socialism and capitalism are clearly defined by how the means of production are controlled.
A separate issue is whether and how we provide a safety net for our citizens and other residents.
I see this as a philosophical issue that stems from the concept of public goods, and how that concept highlights a failing of unbridled free-market capitalism.
Common examples of public goods are clean air and potable water.
I have lived in the greater Los Angeles since early childhood. I experienced smog first hand in grade school when, on some days at recess, it hurt to take a deep breath.
Our air is much cleaner now due to government regulations.
There was no way that problem would have been solved by free-market capitalism.
We had to cast a wide net of regulations and taxes to pull this off.
But what we did was not socialism. Instead, we saved a public good from ruin by providing a safety net.
Safety net strategies are related to political and economic strategies. But they are different and deserve their own forum.
Good observations but considering the urgency of the moment the Oligarchy is stronger than ever. Change will come at a high cost . Even change back to a more classical liberal framework is looking like a stretch . We can start by resisting authoritarian government . Governors and mayors of big cities need to take a stand against the tyranny of the federal government and defend their citizens and their rights. Liberals will have to throw their rule book in the trash bin because the oligarchs and their minions don’t follow the rules.
https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2025/04/04/we-must-get-rid-of-neoliberalism/
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk-politics/2023/02/letter-of-the-week-what-conservatism-knows
"In 1962 I was a Conservative. I believed privilege could only be justified by service, high taxes on very high incomes were necessary to prevent an entrepreneurial economy becoming a rentier economy, and Keynesian growth would finance public service improvements and a welfare state that steadily reduced inequality. I was suspicious of ideologically driven, large-scale change. These were the mainstream policies of the Macmillan government at the time. In 60 years I have moved from centre right to hard left without changing my opinions."
"Like Stephen Watkins, I have hardly changed my political opinions since I was a young man. I was a social democrat, then - a person who believed in pragmatic solutions to real-world problems and who was willing to go out to look for them and who believed that markets had a role, but so did the state.
Who believed that finding the right balance between the two was the thing that was necessary to achieve wellbeing for everyone to the greatest possible degree in society.
Who believed that the state had a duty to care for those whom the market had failed.
Who believed the state had a duty to care for the planet when there was no one else to act as its representative.
Those things do not make you hard left. They make you a decent human being."
I have been painted with the same brush. Explaining if I was a socialist so were our founders who established the postal service, fire fighters, police, libraries as social programs. I lean progressive but support capitalism with safeguards. I have been on the " Tea Party Ship" Several times. Sometimes the best way to express your anger is to throw their tea (money) into a harbor.
Lol oh Mike. I disagree with you so much, and yet I do love your writing, and much of what you have to say. It's comforting knowing that's possible in these difficult times.
You make a good point viz a viz the distinction between the "classically liberal" American Republic of our historical mythos (a view which, I hasten to add, I think is very important, even if I think it's broadly fictional in many important ways), and the current, dreadful, oligarchic, pseudo-historical "American Republic" that is being created by contemporary American fascists. And you also make a number of great points in your delineation between genuine "SOCIALISM" (that big, scary word for many Americans) and the left-libertarian, Rawlsian kind of Republic you're envisioning.
But here's the big elephant in the room: what makes you think that this current devolution into fascism is anything other than the inevitable, logical conclusion of the bourgeois democracy you long to return to? Yes, oligarchs have captured the media; the public, political discourse; the culture; they have warped public perceptions through disinformation and made civil discourse virtually impossible. Look at the rest of the western world and behold: the same process is playing out there, too. It hasn't happened as quickly; and the manifestations of reactionary ideology, and ultimately fascism, have been far less vulgar. But what if this is simply what always happens, so long as our society is wedded to capitalism?
Capitalism is an addiction, Mike. Capitalism is addiction to the dream of individual, unimaginable wealth. It's an addiction to the idea that one person SHOULD be able to change the entire world, all on their own, without the consent or input of their community and peers. And it's killing us; it's killing our standards of living; it's killing our planet. Capitalism is like heroin; you're trying to tell us, "no! It doesn't have to be this way! If we just get the rules right, we can control our addiction!" No, we can't, Mike. Capitalism has led us to this place, and it will always lead us back here.
Capitalism did its job; it helped our civilization evolve, like Feudalism and Mercantilism before it. And now, it's time, at long last, for us to surrender it; to let it go. We can be socialists but still believe in private markets in the domains of extraneous commodities. We can refuse to allow billionaires without allowing for a healthy level of social stratification and relative differences of wealth. What we absolutely cannot do, is continue to make the same mistakes over and over again, because we're desperate to get back to an idealized past that never was.
I think you’re raising the most important challenge any defender of liberal democracy has to confront: what if fascism isn’t an aberration but the natural entropy of capitalism itself?
Where we differ, I think, is that I don’t see “capitalism” as a single moral agent with teleology. I see it as a set of tools for coordinating human activity under the rule of law. The question isn’t whether markets exist—they always will in some form—but whether they’re embedded in a framework that disciplines power and protects human dignity.
Democratic socialism, in the sense most people mean it, isn’t the opposite of liberal democracy—it’s one of its evolutionary stages. If you accept private property, rule of law, constitutional government, and markets for goods and labor, you’re still in the liberal tradition. You’re just emphasizing the social dimension of liberty: that people need material security and equality of opportunity to exercise freedom meaningfully.
That’s why I often say democratic socialists are confused liberals. They’re not wrong about the failures of capitalism—but those failures come not from markets per se, but from the erosion of liberal constraints on concentrated power. The problem isn’t too much capitalism; it’s capitalism without democracy.
Liberalism, properly understood, is the only framework that’s ever been able to contain capitalism’s excesses without lapsing into authoritarian control. The task isn’t to abolish markets but to re-embed them in moral and civic institutions—to make them serve human flourishing rather than the other way around.
You’re right that the idealized republic never fully existed. But ideals matter precisely because they’re aspirational—they give us a moral horizon to steer toward. The cure for liberal failure isn’t post-liberalism; it’s better liberalism.
Mmmmmm....
I don't entirely agree, but I agree with you enough, and enjoy your writing enough, that I don't want to argue any further. I appreciate your thoughtful engagement with what I said.
Um, no, we cannot be socialists and still believe in private markets. Socialism, by definition, is public ownership of the means of production. There's one little problem with Marxism; it has never existed. Socialist revolutions are always hijacked by authoritarians.
Socialism maybe, but not politics pursued by Social Democrats. We do have private ownership and no entusiasm to put everything into state ownership. There are many similarities between Social Democrats and Liberals about the end state of a society. What differs is: How do we get there? Social Democrats believe in maximizing taxes and distribute the surplus to needing citizens. It's been tried in Sweden up until the end of the 70's - it didn't work. Being part of the EU and the international capital market has taught Social Democrats they can not stray too far from the centre, which I believe is good. However,whenever there is a problem with private alternatives the panacea is always "more state control, deprivatize schools or health care". Social Democrats conveniently forget the waiting times when health care was indeed run only by regions or the status ot the schooling system with only public providers. Like Mike said, capitalism is not the problem, the rules governing capitalism are nonlogical, weak and not very longterm. This hurts the visionary entrepreneur and benefit short term rent seekers.
“Public ownership of the means of production” is admits of multiple interpretations you rube; some of them make no allowance whatsoever for private ownership, others do. The Nordic countries are all democratic and socialist. Also, Marxism is not equivalent with socialism. Finally, as I mentioned in my original comment, the global trend of capitalist countries is towards fascism, so this pathetic, knee-jerk “SOCIALISM BAD LOL” bullshit is for the birds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_socialism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makhnovshchina
Market socialism is a type of economic system involving social ownership of the means of production within the framework of a market economy. It has the word "market" in the name, but the means of production are publicly owned. The Makhnovist control over a region of Ukraine was brought to an end when the Red Army invaded Ukraine in January 1920,
My understanding is that what differentiates market socialism from central planning, even if in both cases the rent of capital is taken for public rather than private use, is that the former relies on price signals while the latter does not, and hence it operates in a market framework.
As for Makhnovism, my point there was that it was an attempt to create an anarcho-communist society that failed not because of internal hijacking by authoritarians but external conquest by authoritarians. Would it have worked? Maybe not (I personally doubt that it would), but it wasn't even given a real chance before it was crushed.
Welcome to the socialists- they are the only people in American politics who share your analysis and immediate goals. It's nice of you to join us here, but I'm not sure why you are so insistent on not being one of us.
There is a liberal case for limiting excessive inequalities in wealth: these can undermine the very social basis of a liberal society. Classical liberalism was based on the understanding that elites might use their power to rewrite social rules to their advantage. Adam Smith famously wrote:
“The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order ought always to be listened to with great precaution… It comes from an order of men whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.” — Wealth of Nations, Bk I, ch. XI.
I am way out of my depth here, BUT, the original foundation of American democracy was amongst the thirteen colonies. Jefferson himself wanted to see successive countries founded as part of the western settlement wave of mad, land grabbing destiny.
I don't believe such a democratic ideal is scalable onto the platform of the nation-states we have become today. When we try, we lose our foundational hold on a manageable/sustainable place.
I am a bioregionalist, living in the land of falling waters called Cascadia, verses the corporatized version called the Pacific Northwest.
Once we blow out the integral and social health of regional identity in its comprehensive composition of watersheds and ecoregions, there is no common sense of boundary left, and then like a cancer, political affiliation grows rampant to the utter ruin of all sustainable life on the planet. We live in watersheds, not nation-states! Or hasn't anyone noticed?!
We can loose a nation-state world and still survive, but without watershed viability, there is no life, at least of planet Earth. Is there anywhere else we can adjourn to?
The complexities of markets, capital, and world wide technologies today are more a distraction than a cause of our political dysfunction. We are living beyond our scale, and any talk about solutions on the level of nations, let alone in relation to the global consumer-manufacturing transportation economy is lunacy, without the moonshine!
As a liberal socialist, I agree with most of your analysis but not with your self-identification. Classical liberalism has always been too deferential to property rights, with the result that people like Nozick and Rothbard are treated as legimitate participants in the liberal tradition, rather than as enemies and/or cranks.
In an economy characterised by lots of public goods and economies of size, breaking up monopolies doesn't work. They inevitably reform and can afford advocates to resist further attempts to control them (Chicago revolution in anti-trust). Public ownership (or, if this can;t be done, regulation so tight as to amount to the same thing) is the only solution.
“The structures they built are being systematically circumvented by people who have the resources to work around constitutional constraints.” Indeed. I might add, the structures were built with an assumption that future leaders would be men of honour.
So many are so brainwashed your very reasonable arguments cannot compute in their heads. Bless you for being capable of nuanced understanding of the world around you.
You got it!
As I've said before, I think getting out of this will in part require a reevaluation of what constitutes economic capital and what constitutes economic land, that is, "that value which is the creation of the community".
"The tax upon land values is, therefore, the most just and equal of all taxes. It falls only upon those who receive from society a peculiar and valuable benefit, and upon them in proportion to the benefit they receive. It is the taking by the community, for the use of the community, of that value which is the creation of the community. It is the application of the common property to common uses. When all rent is taken by taxation for the needs of the community, then will the equality ordained by Nature be attained. No citizen will have an advantage over any other citizen save as is given by his industry, skill, and intelligence; and each will obtain what he fairly earns. Then, but not till then, will labor get its full reward, and capital its natural return." (Henry George, "Poverty and Progress")
Michael Hudson neatly describes oligarchy as the counter-revolution of neoliberalism against liberalism, and "socialism" as societal control of economic rules. Several authors have spoken directly to the democratization of corporations as the key to correcting wealth inequality. Once a thriving family business goes public, it needs to have community oversight, lest greedy manipulators again take the upper hand. Those are always lurking, craving advantage over community well-being.
I would be less concerned with a growing family businesses, than with the depredations of Wall St. Hedge funds have been gutting the middle class for decades by buying and stripping businesses of wealth, playing games in financial markets that often end in crisis, forcing taxpayers to pay for the bailouts, while they keep their profits, buying up housing and renting it for profit to the same people who would otherwise own it, buying land, particularly farm land, to control the food supply, and generally gutting the wealth of the nation for their personal gain. There are fundamentally two kinds of oligarchical billionaires; high tech entrepreneurs, who earned their wealth, and hedge fund CEOs and their minions, who are predators.
Tech entrepreneurs "earned" their wealth in the sense that they were willing to take massive losses to drive out competition (or just by buying that competition; anyone remember Google Video? And how it eventually got shut down after Google bought YouTube in what was arguably anticompetitive market consolidation?) and then engage in extortionate monopolistic practices to extract excessive rents.
I was thinking of the ones who actually earned their wealth, rhrough innovation and risk-taking, like Paul Allen, but you're right anyway. I also forgot the oil billionaires in my comment, who profit from exploiting natural resources.
Microsoft only avoided being broken up under antitrust scrutiny by agreeing to a pile of consent decrees (and really should have been broken up; that case more or less heralded the era of not meaningfully enforcing antitrust which has been a major contributor to the current state of affairs).
Allen got rich off of monopolistic rent extraction.
As for oil billionaires, I will just wave a hand in the direction of Norway.
The "Word" has so much value, but it also can be a distraction from getting closer to the "truth."
"Rent-seekers, or rent-seeking," "classical liberalism," and even "moderation" are becoming incomprehensible to me- and I am not sure all these terms tossed out in an air of academic highbrow really serve a purpose. Let me explain.
Through man's history, from Biblical stories of Cain & Abel, there has been this basic or primitive side to man to acquire, to get, to consume. And, there never seems to be enough, so that you hear phrases such as
"The rich get richer, while the poor stay poor"
"Those with the gold make the rules."
Throughout the annals of humankind (sic), we have the prince and the pauper, the Kings and the Serfs, The Hollywood "Rich and Famous" who despite all their extreme wealth appear on just about every advertisement, acquiring still more.
We have popular TV series like Downton Abbey, portraying the absurd wealth and pampering of the ultrarich. And we have the reality of the monarchy in the UK, living in palaces and having, upon their demise, funerals costing more than the net worth of 1,000 "ordinary" people.
All of us have seen and experienced this. A rich uncle of mine would give me an occasional dime, as if it were a deed of great generosity. The poor or moderately wealthy man would tip me 3-5x more than the wealthy professional. In my own profession, I have seen medicine devolve to where the "name of the game" was physician income >> patient outcome. And poster boys for this are in our midst from Musk, to Trump to all the other billionaires that work hard to figure a way to spend their money. There are exceptions like the Gates who are philanthropic.
Our heavily referred to Founding Fathers were steeped in the reading of Plato, where in The Republic, and Charmides the concept of "moderation" is focused. Plato's "moderation" was more than simple self-restraint but rather a fundamental state of Harmony and Order-what we currently are blatantly lacking in the US. Moderation, for Plato, controlled the Appetitive part of the soul and ensured that one's desires did not lead to excess or chaos.
If you read the magnificent work of Dee Hock in The Birth of a Chaordic Age, he expounds on the sickness that pervades our current society:
Ego, Envy, Ambition, and Avarice. What Hock advises is that ego, envy, avarice and ambition (opportunism) must be replaced with Humility, Benevolence*, Altruism, and Magnanimity. Some terms should be defined with the hope of agreement:
Opportunism: a style of human behavior, opportunism has the connotation of a lack of integrity, or doing something that is out of character (inconsistent). The underlying thought is that the price of the unrestrained pursuit of selfishness is behavioral inconsistency. Thus, opportunism involves compromising some or other principles normally upheld. Thus, substantively, opportunism refers to the acting on opportunities in a self-interested, biased or one-sided manner that conflicts or contrasts in some way with one or more general rule, law, norm, or principle. (Wikipedia)
Benevolence: willingness to act to benefit others
Magnanimity: taking actions for noble purposes
If we as a global society, or at the very least as a melting pot of peoples, value such traits over acquisition of stuff, then we need to act and expend effort to achieve such a Republic.
I tend to think we will not have Midterms due to the GOP's devious nature and apparent lack of any moral fiber. Others I know feel we will have Midterms and currently the GOP will be victorious, at least in the Senate. Nothing short of a Democratic majority in all Congress would be satisfactory to me if there is a tiny chance to begin restoration of this crippled country.
This is where I feel our efforts should be. Fixing all other pathologies would follow the goal of restoring sanity to the rules and regulations of governance. What's the point of all other mental masturbation? All it does is create enmity. Those who need to be awakened need more basic talk about human values, about legacy for our children and grandchildren, about vision that will give us any hope of human unity (humanity). First things first.
Wow, an actual conservative. I though you all were extinct.
I have often been called a "bleeding heart liberal." All this plastering people as being this or that does not uncover who and what they are.
A true conservative in the old days was someone who cared most about values. Now the far right calls them liberals. You're so right, labels mean nothing, really.
Let me slightly expand on your reply above since this topic is so important and yet so few comments have been made. Years ago, 1993 to be exact, I was involved in describing the tenets of a new organization focused on patient empowerment. It was funny, but so many of the items selected started with the letter "c."
Choices
Cooperation
Concentration of Effort
Communication
Compassion
Centers
Charity
To this, I would add caring.
But what the above did not touch on is a realization that underscoring all that we humans do to each other, to this planet, and in essence to all biotic and abiotic presentations of life, must be strongly anchored in one unifying concept: Integrity. The "integrity" I speak of goes beyond what most people think of hearing this word. I hope the short paragraph below is fully understandable in its philosophical content. I did not invent this, it is a spirituality that has been shared over a span of thousands of years. If you wish to read/understand this within some incredible, beautiful writing, then read "Mountaineering in Scotland" by W.H. Murray. The title belies the magnificence, the profundity of what Murray expressed in his first non-fiction work. Here's the "bit" about Integrity.
All life (bios) is directed towards unity-- oneness. All interactions have an end-game: balance and interconnectivity, from the structure and function of the solar system to that of an ant colony. The nature of our solar system recreates itself in the structure of an atom, with a central nucleus containing protons surrounded by electrons in their orbital shells. Each particle interacts with all other particles; it is a dynamic network. An ant colony has the same structure with the queen at the core or nucleus of the colony, and various ants acting in different capacities to serve the entity and maintain the unity of the colony. All of humankind's behavior, both political, societal and biological exhibits a similar macrocosm built upon a series of progressively smaller microcosms, which upon further inspection, are themselves found to be the macrocosm upon which another such series can be discerned. The interactions that occur within a human being at a cellular level strive for oneness or integrity, like a solar system, an atomic molecule or an ant colony. Everything is Oneness.
American politicians and much of the population have lost any appreciation for integrity, how much we need it, and its value to future life on this planet. An extraordinary author who has devoted his life to this subject in all kinds of manifestations is Wendell Berry, a 91-year old Kentuckian. Do yourself a great favor and pick up "What Are People For."
--sorry for the long reply.