Monday, December 21, 2009

I Am a Classical Liberal

A friend was on my Facebook page and saw that I consider myself a "Classical Liberal." He then sain, "I expected something more like Ronald Reagan conservative."

So I went ahead and explained to him in a nutshell what I meant:


Let me put it this way. When I hear "Reagan Conservative" I instantly think of massive, overbearing, intrusive government with a great big American flag plastered over the front of it. That is NOT me.

I am a classical liberal in the tradition of John Locke, many of our founding fathers (Thomas Jefferson in particular), Frederic Bastiat and Ron Paul. A classical liberal believes in the God-given natural rights of human beings to life, liberty and property; and understands that the purpose of government is to protect those rights to the extent that we as individuals can not efficiently do it ourselves. Crime is the forceful violation of another person's rights and the only legitimate circumstance to deprive a person of any of their rights is in response to their unlawful deprivation of another's rights. And in all cases, the punishment should match the offense plus with extra compensation to the victim. It is a very simple philosophy that leaves no room for large, overbearing government. And it is a philosophy right in line with our Declaration of Independence and Constitution. It is worth pointing out that the Constitution only delegates 18 powers/responsibilities to Congress, then the Executive branch has the responsibility of faithfully executing those laws and the Judicial branch is supposed to watch and make sure all legislation fits within the confines of the Constitution and natural law. Very simple. If our federal government stuck to the Constitutional formula, it would be extremely small, in fact significanly smaller than any State legislature. Can you imagine that?!?! Oh, how far we have fallen!

In summary, as a classical liberal, I stand uncompromising in support of "the laws of nature and nature's God."


To learn more about classical liberalism, visit http://www.lbccs.org/.