Finland had to lower their high taxes on alcohol a couple of years ago, because of smuggling, and this week there’s a new study saying the effects was catastrophic, a marked increase in the number of alcoholics. We’ve also lowered our alcohol taxes because of smuggling and legal imports two-three years ago, though less drastically IIRC.
LB’s reaction to Jim Henley, and libertarians generally, is the same as mine. I pared it down to slogan a few years ago. In case I haven’t put it down i writing before, here it is. As a good liberal (in the proper sense), I’m well aware that the state is dangerous, but you can’t make the governement less dangerous by making it smaller.
…now wingnutty commenter Baa is claiming bigger government leads to more corruption, which would explain why Nigeria is so much cleaner than Norway. Empirically, there’s a strong correlation, but in the opposite direction. In reality, there’s never gonna be a lack of opportunities for corruption.
It’s a cliche by now that in Europe liberal means the opposite of what it means in the US, which is a lttle off.
You do see people use liberal as a synonym for rightwinger sometimes, but most rightwingers are conservatives, and there are center-left as well as center-right liberal parties in Europe, and they’re all pretty centrists. Libertarians in Europe, and to a lesser extent the US, call themselves liberals, or even the only true liberals. I don’t really think most libertarians are any kind of liberal.
I think most US progressives who call themselves liberals tend to be liberal in the “real” sense. One may think that liberal in the US refers exclusivley to progressives, but it just truck me I can think of a few exceptions, namely the whole beltway pundit establishment. Cohen, Broder, Weisberg, Hiatt, Raines, Keller, etc. The pain caucus. They’re often described as liberals and some cases embrace the term. They don’t refer to themselves as progressives, and indeed, they aren’t.
LB wonders about the difference between a progressive and a liberal. (Also.) The commenters in that thread all assume the terms are either interchangeable, or mutually exclusive. That’s not at all how I think of them.
One might ask oneself if liberal, (or conservative or socialist) means anything these days, and I can’t say all other definitions are wrong per se, but I think my use of the term makes more sense, and leads to less muddled thinking.
Progressive I would define as someone who is strongly committed to egalitarianism, the common good, changing the world for the better, and internationalism. Like leftwing, but an absolute term, whereas left should be a relative term.
Liberal I would define as someone who is strongly commmited to liberty, personal autonomy, suspicion of state power, the rule of law, proceduralism, reason, rational discourse, enlightened self interest, internationalism, concentration of power, and arguably being for a market economy and against central planning, among other things.
So egalitarian liberals is one type of progressive along with social democrats, radical socialists, marxists, some varieties of populists, most communitarians among others (as well as unaffiliated progressives).
LB post seems to be thinking of the US late cold war era use of the terms. The crowd that reads Counterpunch and the Progressive still wants the term for themselves, but then they also, absurdly, claim “leftist” for themselves.