the smugness is always the worst part.
I’ve never encountered this type of liberal. Neolib, sure.
Liberalism is an ideology with two main parts. First is political liberalism which focuses on individual freedoms, democracy, and human rights. Second is economic liberalism which centers around free markets, private property, and wealth accumulation. These two aspects form a contradiction. Political liberalism purports to support everyone’s freedom, while economic liberalism enshrines private property rights as sacred in laws and constitutions, effectively removing them from political debate.
Liberalism justifies the use of state violence to safeguard property rights even when they come into direct conflict with providing necessities such as food, shelter, and healthcare. The idea that private property is a key part of individual freedom provides the foundational justification for the rich to keep their wealth while ignoring the needs of everyone else. Thus, all the talk of promoting freedom and democracy is nothing more than a fig leaf to provide cover for justifying capitalist relations.
This is an excellent primer on the subject https://orgrad.wordpress.com/articles/liberalism-the-two-faced-tyranny-of-wealth/
Neolibs are just a subcategory of liberal, though.
I’m not actually sure that’s true.
Why wouldn’t it be? Liberalism is the ideological superstructure of capitalism, Neoliberals are a particular type.
There’s a little bit more nuance than that isn’t there? You can provide these things, but we still need to produce things right? Because we haven’t yet reached full automation. So the question is if we provide those things and a significant part of the population decide that they are happy with the minimum and thus they don’t want to work, and we start having massive labor shortages such that the goods needed to sustain the economy cannot be produced, what do we do? Well the only solution at that point is to make labor mandatory, and forced if the individual is noncompliant. Which is why the labor market as it exists is seen as the lesser evil. This is a bit of an oversimplification because I’m not looking to write an essay here but that covers the gist of why a liberal may oppose full on socialism.
For me, the imperative is achieving that automation. Only then is full socialism viable.
We don’t need to reach full automation. We throw away half the food we produce right now, there is more empty housing having been bought up for speculation than there are people in the US or Canada. The problem is with the economic system that fails to distribute according to need. The solution is to ensure that workers are the primary beneficiaries of their own labour as opposed to the oligarchs who own capital.
