In the previous video, I laid out a structure understanding conservatism in America. The parts of it interacts with social welfare economics. In this lecture, I want to try and do the same thing with liberalism. Liberalism is a very wide term. So there are many parts of it, but let's start with some sort of basic pieces. The fundamental value based in liberalism that's an idea of economic fairness. This fairness can be talked about in terms of equality. Equality means that everybody has the same chance or equality means that everybody has the same amount. Those are two different extremes and so most Americans have some commitment to equal opportunity. A few Americans really are committed to a completely equal distribution of goods in the country. One mind exercise is that if everybody was given a $100,000 and you came back in a year, some people would have lost it all and some people would have made money. Would you then take the money away from those who made and give everybody a $100,000 again? So that kind of question is a complicated one and beyond what we're going to do here. Second idea of fairness is equity. Equity means that everybody is treated the same. If you go before a judge, if you apply for school, if you apply for a mortgage for your house, the trip and of everyone is the same. The third idea is adequacy. Adequacy is do people have enough? Do people have what they need to be able to live their lives? Food, housing, transportation, healthcare, emotional support, all of these things can be part of adequacy. So to me the idea of economic fairness in a liberal perspective is to maintain a productive market economy and to make sure that everybody benefits from this. So liberalism has a commitment to re-distributive policies. Market capitalism tends to move money up to a few, if you've ever played the game monopoly, you know that there is [inaudible] happen. Liberalist believe that there needs to be a process to work against that to move money around from both who have acquired a lot to those who do not have what they need. Therefore, they believe in public investment in education, health care, housing, and in those who are left behind. So these are concepts of fairness that under-guard most liberal thinking. As a result, they believe in progressive taxation. That is that the more you have, the higher percentage of your income you should be taxed with. So economic liberals think about need for and or equity versus efficiency. Remember when we talked about conservatives, we talked about the centrality of efficiency and making sure that everything is running at its peak performance. Liberalism would push back and say that it need and equity as important values in any society as efficiency. The market economy creates wealth and therefore economic liberals are committed to the market economy. Committed to private property, to exchange, to prices and price theory. But the world tends to be held by a few. So there are need for appropriate and necessary interventions to redistribute wealth. Investing widely in the population also increases wealth. So the country becomes more wealthy as we educate everybody, as we make sure everybody has adequate health care, enough nutrition, and adequate housing. That all of this both in and of itself, it makes people wealthy, but it also creates the capacity for the nation to develop more wealth. It's necessary for workers to be organized, that the people who own businesses have a great deal of power and individual workers do not have the ability to negotiate with owners, and so workers have to be organized in order to gain successfully and reasonably negotiate with owners. So that creates a balance of power between owners and workers. This would be a major disagreement between conservatives and liberals. It has to do with unions and union regulations. So the need to always balance regulation with the market, wage regulation, workplace safety regulation, workday regulation, overtime regulation, health and safety regulation, environmental regulation, affirmative action regulation, all of these things are balancing the market so that the market produces, but it also creates a society with some kind of sense of fairness. So from a liberal point of view, the meaning of freedom is everybody having a place at the table. As Franklin D Roosevelt used to say that there's a chicken in every pot. So the concept of liberalism is really based on this mixed view of the market and managing the market for the benefit of the widest population. Private property is always balanced against the public need and it's never completely a value in and of itself. Again, this is a major disagreement between conservatives and liberals. So I thought I would close by trying to say a few words about people who describe themselves as progressives or social democrats. Those things are not necessarily the same things, but they tend to overlap. Progressives and social democrats have great deal less confidence and market-based systems. They tend to see them as just resulting in moving money from workers to the owners, and creating massive income inequality. They're very concerned about making sure that we have a much more equal society and that we reform the history of racism, marginalization, gender discrimination, and other forms of discrimination that have shaped the nation. They're much more confident about government owned and administrative approaches. So conservatives tend to believe that the government when it gets involved in managing things, doesn't do it very well. Liberals are skeptical, but they're prepared to use government on a managed position, progressives and social democrats prefer them. We see this debate a great deal in the national charter school debate. It's also very much in the formula for a front of the housing debate, and so how the role of government in provision. So progressives and social democrats believe in much higher taxes and much more market regulation, because they believe that the system is really completely balanced in favor of a certain small group of people, that regulations and taxes are the way to fix that. So most social democrats at some level or other except some degree of market regulation, but there are people in the social democrat world that reject capitalism completely, they feel capitalism is a system of oppression, and they talk about replacing it with democratic socialism. The conversation about what the replacement would look like is often fairly weak and not very well developed. So I hope these thoughts about liberals and social democrats have been useful.
