The Development of Classical Liberal Ideology: Next installment

 By way of introduction,here is a word from Paul Campos:Sociopathy can even be transformed into a political ideology: It ’s called “libertarianism,” and its votaries labor mightily to escape the natural implications of their views, by inventing elaborate and subtle arguments about how self-interested defection from social norms will not actually be self-interested in the long run, for Reasons. A common source of confusion is that the term " liberal " has come to mean something rather different than it did in the 19th Century. The so-called " neoliberalism " that we endured beginning with the Clinton Administration was actually an attempt to get back to something closer to the original meaning, and probably should have been called paleoliberalism. But libertarianism is the term we use today for what was called liberalism in the 19th Century.* I hope that leaves everybody less confused. The Wealth of Nations, as I have said, is not a scientific work. It doesn ' t rely on any sort of rigorous empirical observation. On the contrary, much of it consists of fables and myths, and what observations is does contain are largely anecdotal.  As the physical and biological sciences made breakthroughs in understanding and gained prestige, economists felt the need to place their own theorizing on a more rigorous footing. However, they reasoned backwards: rather than doing real research or conducting experiments, they considered what component facts would need to be...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs