> They're libertarians-light, believing that everyone should be free to do whatever they want, be it economically or socially, and there should be minimal impediment to doing so.

Your comment is a (reasonable) critique of libertarianism, but you're presenting it as liberalism, which only confuses things more.

> But according to the liberal, woe to them that try to rebalance the economic scales of power via things like unions or laws.

People who know the difference between the two would not suggest unions or legislation to help smaller players in society is bad. A balance of strong laws, a constitution, and a varying amount of state control of the economy is part of the ideology.

> "take from the weak and give to the strong". That already is the nature of the world and it is our moral obligation to rise above it.

At least when I was in college, political science 101 started with Hobbes vs Locke, the "state of nature", "Leviathan" vs "Two Treatises" and how that rolls into the US Constitution. Smith, Bentham, then Mill vs Rawls (classical liberalism and freedom of opportunity, On Liberty, the "veil of ignorance" and A Theory of Justice) and even further into the distinction between modern and classical liberalism (freedom from vs freedom to, equality of outcome and how that starts merging with socialism with social democracy.) Even within 1st year courses we cover criticisms of liberalism (Nozick on the right, then Marx and Gramsci on the left) and mixing it up with libertarianism is not part of that critique.

We learn that liberalism was literally a response to "take from the weak" so to present it as a primary criticism is... interesting.

> We learn that liberalism was literally a response to "take from the weak" so to present it as a primary criticism is... interesting.

If 3M dumps PFAS-related chemicals into rivers that feed drinkwater, its good business. If you or I pour a few cups of PFAS-related chemicals into our neighbor's well, that'll get us arrested for poisoning.

That's why I said "minimum impediment", which is something you would usually associate with libertarianism. The current strain of Western liberalism has evolved even past libertarianism. At least with libertarianism, the state is supposed to protect you from force and fraud. With modern-day Western liberalism, the state de facto licenses businesses to poison and defraud you so long as it makes the economy grow.

So yes, currently, (neo?)liberalism seems to lead to eat the weak to feed the powerful. It might not say that outright, and its talking points might be more noble, but if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck..

It's led to the point where as soon as I hear someone in the West declare that they're a liberal (again, non-US), I immediately assume their primary goal is to further the tearing down of the social fabric of society so that businesses have even more power to make number go up.

I heard the beauty of a statement "we will make 140.000 people on welfare even more destitute, so that it becomes more attractive to work minimum wage", from the main liberal party in The Netherlands, supposedly a beacon of liberalism. That is malicious, bordering on malevolent.

That sounds like a failure of the state to me.

That's a narrow definition of liberalism.

The common denominator between liberals isn't economics; it's an acceptance of differences.

There are political movements that are liberal and still bad, but there is no political movement I can think of that would be made worse by sticking Liberal- in front of it.

Democracy is one imo. And at the very least it's something I think we can agree is debatable.

Liberal democracy thinks the economy, even natural monopolies, should be organized around a free market of LLCs that all get to act self-interestedly.

Social democracy thinks the economy should be organized around state monopolies and a regulated market, along with public institutions for social and labor issues such as collective bargaining, unions, social safety nets and universal healthcare.

The terms are not mutually exclusive.

Sweden, for example, is both a social democracy, and a liberal democracy.

If the SD got its way, Sweden might be an illiberal social democracy. That's not my idea of a good time.

Sweden has aspects of both. But the thing that makes Sweden good is the social democracy.

SD = Sverigedemokraterna, the right-wing populists? They are attempting to make it illiberal, but also remove social policies.

There is not 'one thing' alone that makes a system of government good.

Sverigedemokraterna are noteworthy because of their illiberalism, and not much else. What they complain about is not the Swedish safety net, but that there are people in Sweden (eg: Sami, arabs, etc) who don't look and think as they do.

Whenever xenophobes get into government, they start cutting social safety nets, because it disproportionately hurts minorities.

This eventually hurts everyone else as well, but at least the brown people got the worst of it.

What? that "one thing" is that everybody gets a say. Democracy gets made fun of, because three wolves a a sheep voting on dinner has an obvious problem, but under a dictatorship, the ruling party of three wolves over one sheep still has that probablm, so we shouldn't throw democracy out just yet.

The Sweden Democrats (Sverigedemokraterna) is just the name of the political party. A more truthful name would be the Sweden Xenophobes.

At this point, the thread could get complicated because Democracy is yet another term that is 'orthogonal' to Liberalism. I must have mangled my comment horribly if it sounded like I was advocating for dictatorship!

To the contrary, my preferred form of government is Liberal Democracy, preferably with a strong social safety net (so if it's also a Social Democracy, that suits me well)