What Does "Liberal" Mean?

The adjective liberal involves being open to, respecting, and accepting ideas and behavior different from one's own. This requires education. Without education, exposure to new ideas is limited. Wrestling with the challenges posed by new ideas is limited. Knowledge of one's self, and one's place in the world, is limited without education. Education is the cornerstone of being liberal. Without being open to new ideas, personal growth and development — and the growth and development of societies — is limited.

A painful lesson in the consequences of not being open to new ideas is the history of what happens when a steel-age culture with guns and trains encounters a stone-age culture with bows and arrows. By not being open to the new idea of a written language, and preserving and maintaining traditions for tens of thousands of years, the indigenous First Nations people of North America left themselves open to being killed by the millions — and American Buffalo being killed by the millions — resulting in the Indian Reservation System we have today. Native peoples could not defend themselves or their culture against the much larger, more technologically sophisticated cultures with guns, germs, and steel.

Education

The best education is an enlightening experience and process of facilitating learning, and the acquisition of knowledge, skills, values, morals, beliefs, habits, and personal development. Education is also the transmission of cultural heritage from one generation to the next.

Education is about individual character and the character of societies, as well as about scientific and technological advancement. Life is a battle for survival. People and societies who are the most open to all of the ideas in the world — who pick and choose and adapt those ideas for their own purposes devoted to progress — are more likely to survive and to defeat individuals and societies who do not do so.

The best education has an element of reconnaissance to it. Openness to new ideas is in part openness to the early identification of threats. Information and its analysis allows more accurate predictions of hostility. For example, by having highly educated and experienced software engineers and analysts, we can see the kinds of malware, ransomware, spyware, and other attacks on our infrastructure and how those attacks change and increase in sophistication. Our defenses must account for and adapt to the attacks. We fail to do so at our peril.

Educated people live longer, produce more, earn more, and are generally happier and more satisfied with their lives. Educated people also tend to have educated children and grandchildren. The wide availability of education and correspondingly high rates of literacy tend to increase opportunities for large numbers of people.

Therefore, policies relating to universal access to the best education for the most people — based on merit, without regard to sex, race, ethnicity, religion, or disability — are of paramount importance. Legacy admission not based on academic merit is anathema. The solution is not to admit the unqualified; it is to get more diverse people qualified. The cumulative effects of privilege over about 18 years is what produces the gap between the dominant and the dominated. A change in admissions policies admitting less qualified people is a shortcut through a field of poison ivy — shorter, but resulting in being covered with itchy sores. The long, hard work of breaking barriers that exist before children are born and persist throughout their lives is what is required.

Reducing Inequality With a Social Safety Net Including Education, Healthcare & Housing

If equal access to education by those with the academic merit to make the most of educational opportunities is foundational to what it means to be liberal, and poverty, unemployment, drug addiction, crime, mass incarceration, race-based policing, behavioral health issues, and the legacy of redlining are interfering with that equal access — then reducing inequality of opportunity and improving the social safety net is key to supporting the highest liberal value placed on education.

Scandinavian countries are known around the world for their strong social safety nets and low levels of wealth and income inequality. Education, healthcare, and housing are rights of citizenship. Not surprisingly, countries like Finland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Iceland consistently rank high in personal happiness relative to other countries.

Healthcare and housing support education. It is difficult to go through the process of getting an education if you are sick or unhoused. Every student should be allowed to get as much education as that student's choice to use ability and ambition can get them. Education should be like Juilliard. You can't pay. You earn your way in and earn your way out. It doesn't matter if you don't have shoes.

Protecting the Environment & Workers

Education, healthcare, housing, and relatively low wealth and income inequality aren't much use if climate change makes the world increasingly less habitable for humans, and low wages, union busting, and dangerous conditions make work increasingly miserable for many people.

The Earth itself supports all life. If a person is in a coma on life support, we wouldn't play around unplugging the ventilator for a few minutes to see what happens. You just don't play around with a person's life support. It is not a joke. They literally need it to live. Yet that is what we do to ourselves and our planet. If some alien civilization were pumping carbon into our atmosphere and increasing greenhouse gases to degrade our climate, the world would mobilize and unify in opposition. However, since we are doing it to ourselves, the alarm bells are heard by many people — but not everyone — and we slowly work toward reduction.

Society should both encourage education for those who want it, and not judge those who don't. People who do not attain high levels of education but work hard and are honest are a credit to society. They are the backbone of society. Without them, we would just be a blob of goo on the floor with a head reading and thinking as we starved to death.

Individual Rights, Civil Liberties, Democracy & Free Enterprise

These values can sometimes conflict with a strong social safety net, low wealth and income inequality, and merit-based non-exclusionary access to education. Individual rights and civil liberties are limited by everyone else's individual rights and civil liberties. Free enterprise is limited by the SEC and the FTC.

To be liberal means to weigh and balance these competing values and to keep searching in order to find optimal policies to strike and preserve balance. For example, protection of the Spotted Owl in Oregon does have an economic impact on the logging industry. The conflict is real and can be heated. Getting all of the information and making conscious, informed public policy choices regarding preserving an endangered species and mitigating harm to loggers and the logging industry is necessary and important.

I was heartened by the testimony of Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve Chair who was a proponent of the philosophy of Ayn Rand and believed that government had no role in policing fraud and corruption in capital markets. He said he was wrong. Lack of government oversight is what allowed the orgy of greed that created the worldwide economic collapse of 2007.

Free Enterprise Capitalism is the most powerful economic engine yet devised in the history of the world, practiced in various forms even in Communist countries such as China and Russia. No other system can compete with the wealth-building of free people seeking to maximize profit. But unfettered Capitalism is hellish and practiced by no nation on Earth.

No rational person can argue that government does not have a role in protecting and managing these harms. The issue is what is the cost-benefit analysis of government regulation. Getting the right amount of tax and regulation requires an open mind, tolerance to different ideas, public debate, and effort in reaching compromises. That is what liberal means to me — and why it is important for the world.