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Classical liberalism is a political ideology, a branch of liberalism which advocates civil liberties and political freedom with representative democracy under the rule of law and emphasizes economic freedom.[1][2]

Classical liberalism developed in the 19th century in Europe and the United States. Although classical liberalism built on ideas that had already developed by the end of the 18th century, it advocated a specific kind of society, government and public policy as a response to the Industrial Revolution and urbanization.[3] Notable individuals whose ideas have contributed to classical liberalism include John Locke,[4]Jean-Baptiste Say, Thomas Malthus, and David Ricardo. It drew on the economics of Adam Smith and on a belief in natural law,[5]utilitarianism,[6] and progress.[7]

In the late 19th century, classical liberalism developed into neo-classical liberalism, which argued for government to be as small as possible to allow the exercise of individual freedom. In its most extreme form, neo-classical liberalism advocated Social Darwinism.[8]Right-libertarianism is a modern form of neo-classical liberalism.[8]

The term classical liberalism was applied in retrospect to distinguish earlier 19th-century liberalism from the newer social liberalism.[9] The phrase classical liberalism is also sometimes used to refer to all forms of liberalism before the 20th century, and some conservatives and libertarians use the term classical liberalism to describe their belief in the primacy of individual freedom and minimal government. It is not always clear which meaning is intended.[10][11][12]

Core beliefs of classical liberals included new ideaswhich departed from both the older conservative idea of society as a family and from later sociological concept of society as complex set of social networksthat individuals were "egoistic, coldly calculating, essentially inert and atomistic"[13] and that society was no more than the sum of its individual members.[14]

Classical liberals agreed with Thomas Hobbes that government had been created by individuals to protect themselves from one another, and that the purpose of government should be to minimize conflict between individuals that would otherwise arise in a state of nature.

These beliefs were complemented by a belief that labourers could be best motivated by financial incentive.[citation needed] This led classical liberal politicians at the time to pass the Poor Law Amendment Act 1834, which limited the provision of social assistance, because classical liberals believed in markets as the mechanism that would most efficiently lead to wealth. Adopting Thomas Malthus's population theory, they saw poor urban conditions as inevitable; they believed population growth would outstrip food production, and they regarded that consequence desirable, because starvation would help limit population growth. They opposed any income or wealth redistribution, which they believed would be dissipated by the lowest orders.[15]

Drawing on selected ideas of Adam Smith, classical liberals believed that it is in the common interest that all individuals must be able to secure their own economic self-interest, without government direction.[16] They were critical of the welfare state[17] as interfering in a free market. They criticised labour's group rights being pursued at the expense of individual rights,[18] while they accepted big corporations' rights being pursued at the expense of inequality of bargaining power noted by Adam Smith:[19]

A landlord, a farmer, a master manufacturer, a merchant, though they did not employ a single workman, could generally live a year or two upon the stocks which they have already acquired. Many workmen could not subsist a week, few could subsist a month, and scarce any a year without employment. In the long run the workman may be as necessary to his master as his master is to him; but the necessity is not so immediate.

Classical liberals believed that individuals should be free to obtain work from the highest-paying employers, while the profit motive would ensure that products that people desired were produced at prices they would pay. In a free market, both labour and capital would receive the greatest possible reward, while production would be organised efficiently to meet consumer demand.[20]

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Classical liberalism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Fox News co-host and contributor Bob Beckel has called for the assassination of WikiLeaks spokesperson Julian Assange (A dead man cant leak stuffFollow the Money, 12/6/10), for furnishing guns to school children (If you give your kid a gun, no bullyingFive, 1/5/12) and for militant opposition to the War on Christmas, which is completely out of hand (Five, 12/9/11).

These views are anything but out of place on Fox News, where hosts and commentators are known for fantasizing about murdering progressives (FAIR Blog, 11/10/10), deifying gun ownership (Beck, 6/29/11) and courageously confronting those who would wish them happy holidays (OReilly Factor, 11/17/11).

Bob BeckelPhoto Credit: Wikimedia Commons

But Beckel is presented as a left-leaning voice on Fox, a counterweight to the networks army of right-leaning talkers. And hes far from an atypical specimen there.

As one of five co-hosts on Foxs new program the Five, Beckel is supposed to serve as foil to four conservative co-hosts. Thats the theory. In reality, Beckel more than occasionally joins his conservative counterparts. (Typically, Five panelists include former George W. Bush aide Dana Perino, Fox News Red Eye anchor Greg Gutfield, Fox legal commentator Kimberly Guilfoyle and Fox Business Network host Eric Bolling.)

For instance, when Beckels colleague Bolling (Five, 12/14/11) recounted how hed kicked a representative from the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) off his Fox Business show (Follow the Money,12/12/11) for opposing the display of a nativity scene at a Texas courthouse, Beckel bluntly approved: Good. When Five co-host Greg Gutfield (12/9/11) compared FFRF to a woman whod once demanded that he put out his cigarette, Beckels only response was, Did you deck her?

Discussing charges that GOP Rep. Mark Foley (Fla.) had exchanged inappropriate messages with male congressional pages (Hannity & Colmes, 10/2/06), Beckel suggested that Foley, because hes gay, should have been kept away from pages to begin with, likening him to a notorious bank robber: If Willie Sutton is around some place where a bank is robbed, then youre probably going to say, Willie, stay away from the robbery.

In the USA Today column in which Beckel likewise plays the left, regularly exchanging views with former Moral Majority executive and fellow Fox commentator Cal Thomas, Beckel (3/24/11) agreed with his right-wing counterpart that nuclear power is a necessary component of our quest for energy independence, and it should not be abandoned no matter how horrific the scenes are coming out of Japan.

Fox knew what it was getting with Beckel, whose reputation for faking left and going right goes back years. In July 1998, Extra! described Beckel as

a corporate lobbyist whose firm represents phone companies, the insurance industry and other corporate clients. Beckel frequently urges the Democratic Party to move to the right; he supported Clintons push for government downsizing, noting that the unions will grumble, the left will scream (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 9/14/93). During the Gulf War, he denounced protesters as punks (Foxs Off the Record, 1/26/91).

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With Fox News Liberals, Who Needs Conservatives? FAIR

Fedeli calls out Liberals on cap and trade costs April 13, 2015
Ontario PC Finance Critic Vic Fedeli points out how Liberals can #39;t be trusted on their cap-and-trade scheme.

By: Vic Fedeli

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Fedeli calls out Liberals on cap and trade costs April 13, 2015 - Video

What separates conservatives from liberals? In the past decade, the most illuminating answers to this question have come from Jonathan Haidt, a New York University psychologist whose research bears directly on the emerging 2016 presidential campaign even if his answers might not be quite right.

Haidts basic finding is simple. Throughout history, human beings have operated under five sets of moral commitments: avoidance of harm, fairness, loyalty, authority and sanctity. Conservatives recognize all five, but liberals recognize only the first two.

Conservatives and liberals agree on the importance of avoiding harm. If someone assaults someone else, people of every political stripe object. The two sides also agree on the importance of fairness. People who cheat one another, or break promises, meet with bipartisan disapproval even if people often disagree over what fairness requires.

According to Haidts research, what separates conservatives from liberals is that they also care a great deal about loyalty, authority and sanctity. Suppose that people have betrayed their family, or that they have acted disrespectfully toward their parents or their bosses, or that they have engaged in a disgusting act. Conservatives are far more likely than liberals to feel moral outrage.

To test this claim, Haidt asked people in the U.S. and Britain this question: When you decide whether something is right or wrong, to what extent are the following considerations relevant to your thinking? Both liberals and conservatives emphasized whether someone was harmed and whether someone acted unfairly. But conservatives were much more inclined to think that it was also relevant whether people betrayed their group or did something disgusting and whether the people involved were of the same rank.

More dramatically, Haidt also asked thousands of people how much money they would have to be paid to engage in certain actions, such as kicking a dog in the head or shooting an animal (harm), cheating in a game of cards or throwing out a box of ballots to help their favorite candidate (unfairness), burning their countrys flag or breaking off relations with their family (disloyalty), cursing their parents to their face or making a disrespectful hand gesture to their boss or teacher (abuse of authority), and getting a blood transfusion from a disease-free child molester (violation of sanctity). Peoples answers could range from $0 (Id do it for free) up to $1 million or never for any amount of money.

On the harm and fairness questions, liberals and conservatives did not require substantially different amounts. But for questions that involved loyalty, authority and sanctity, conservatives required a lot more money strongly suggesting that for them, those values loomed especially large.

The difference even maps onto preferences for dog breeds. Conservatives are especially likely to want dogs that are loyal and obedient. (Everyone wants dogs that are clean.)

In his later work, Haidt has rightly emphasized a sixth moral foundation, one that conservatives and liberals both respect, but that they understand differently: liberty. He finds that conservatives are more likely to emphasize the right to be let alone, while liberals emphasize the rights of vulnerable groups, such as racial minorities, whose freedom requires (in their view) government support. Nonetheless, the biggest and most consistent partisan differences involve loyalty, authority and sanctity.

Haidts central claim is that across partisan lines, people often fail to understand one another, because a moral concern that strongly motivates one group may be obscure or unintelligible to another. Democrats are wrong to be puzzled when rural and working-class Americans turn out to favor Republicans. There is no puzzle here, because Republicans are more likely to speak to their deepest moral commitments.

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What conservatives care about that liberals dont

OTTAWA Former finance minister Ralph Goodale gave an impassioned defence of the Liberals economic record Tuesday after recent attacks by the Harper Conservatives suggested that the party would plunge Canada back into spiralling deficits like those of the 1970s.

He kept the door open, however, to a new Trudeau governments running future deficits.

Speaking at a Canada 2020 event, Goodale, Canadas finance minister from 2003 to 2006, said current Finance Minister Joe Olivers recent remarkably bitter comments about Pierre Elliott Trudeaus economic record ignored the Conservatives own history.

[Oliver] forgot the OPEC oil crisis of that decade. He forgot [Progressive Conservative prime minister] John Diefenbaker's six consecutive deficits a decade earlier. He forgot that only one Conservative prime minister in the entire 20th century actually managed to balance a budget. That was Robert Borden, the year was 1912, and it lasted for just one year, Goodale told the Liberal-friendly crowd, many of whom have been waiting months to hear a similar speech.

More importantly, Mr. Oliver forgot that more than two-thirds of all the federal debt outstanding in Canada today can be attributed to the deficits accumulated by Brian Mulroney and Stephen Harper, Goodale said. Mr. Harper alone has added $4,400 in new Harper-debt for every man, woman and child in Canada.

Compare that, he said, with the Liberal record.

Goodale said when the Liberals came to power in 1993 after defeating Brian Mulroney, they inherited a $40 billion annual deficit and a debt ratio that was 70 per cent of GDP. Just serving that debt was sucking up fully one-third of all government revenues.

Within three years, Goodale said, the Liberals had eliminated the deficit, ushered in a decade of surplus budgets, paid down the debt and slashed the debt-ratio in half, cut taxes and safeguarded the banking system. He also said the Liberals had increased transfers to the provinces, although he glanced over the part where the Grits first slashed them.

Times were great, Goodale suggested. The economy was growing, millions of new jobs were created.

Fast forward to 2006, he said, when Prime Minister Stephen Harper inherited a $13 billion annual surplus. In less than three years, the country is back on the verge of deficits once again, Goodale said. That was before not because of the recession, which arrived in the latter part of 2008.

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Ralph Goodale Fires Back At Joe Oliver Over 'Bitter' Attacks On Pierre Trudeau