The liberal tag explosion

We had reached a stage where political labels had become very much out of fashion. The fall of the Iron Curtain and the dismemberment of what was the Soviet Union had essentially transformed the term Communism into a taboo.

The term Christian Democracy had also lost favour because of its strong religious connection and the aggregation of centre and centre right parties is called the European People’s Party.

Socialists started calling themselves Progressive in order to get rid of the negative that the concept of the political left conjured up. So the old political labels fell in disuse.

In the meantime, economic and social realities have forced political parties to reduce their differences on economic policies. For example, today no one questions whether the income tax system should be progressive or regressive, as there is agreement that the higher one’s income the higher the proportion that one pays in tax.

Today, very few people question whether the state should continue to be involved in the operation of the economy, other than in the provision of public goods such as water and electricity (where some controversy still exists).

Thus there is agreement that the economy needs to be a mixed one; if anything, there is a debate as to the extent that it should be mixed. The debate is where the dividing line between the state and private enterprise should be.

This year, just as we had got used to doing without political labels, in Malta we had the explosion of the liberal tag. It started during the debate about divorce and has carried on since then, with various people claiming that Malta needs to become more liberal.

My issue is that I very much doubt whether those persons claiming to be pushing forward the liberal agenda agree between them as to what they mean by the term. I do not believe that there is a common definition of the term Liberal in such people’s minds.

Without sounding as if I am trying to teach grannies how to suck eggs, or as if any of the readers fell of the back of a milk truck, we need to place things in a historical perspective.

John Locke, who is often credited for the creation of liberalism as a distinct philosophical tradition, employed the concept of natural rights and the social contract to argue that the rule of law should replace absolutism in government, that rulers were subject to the consent of the governed, and that private individuals had a fundamental right to life, liberty, and property, and this eventually led to a spread of civil liberties.

From an economic perspective, liberalism led to the creation of the welfare state. As such from both the social and the economic perspectives, liberal ideology was very much a territory of the left. The spread of communism and the great depression in the 1930s changed the economic viewpoint of what represented liberalism. Liberals started to claim that completely free markets were the optimal economic units capable of effectively allocating resources – that over time, in other words, they would produce full employment and economic security.

This viewpoint was certainly not left leaning. Till this day, when we speak of liberalism, we tend to refer to a much reduced role for the state in the economy. This would imply a stronger element of capitalism, less regulation and a greater inequality in the distribution of income. Are we sure that this is what we want when we speak in favour of liberal policies?

One final comment about the liberal tag. Being more liberal does not necessarily mean more liberty from both the social perspective and the economic perspective, even though the origin of both words is the same. So before we do embark on a campaign to become more liberal, let us make sure we understand what the term really means and what the implications really are.