My usual explanation for why I call myself a libertarian instead of a liberal is that after the enemies of liberalism stole its name we needed a new one.1 In a recent Substack post, however, Matthew Yglesias writes that: I take the central feature of classical liberalism, as of libertarianism, to be the commitment to individual liberty, the right to do things, to buy, sell, speak, travel, 'Laissez faire et laissez passer.' What is now called liberalism ' the moderate left of the current U.S. political spectrum ' abandoned that negative liberty in favor of what is sometime called positive liberty, the right to an adequate level of food, education, medicine paid for and provided, if necessary, by someone else. The two, both labeled liberty, are not consistent with each other; if you have a right to be fed by me I do not have a right to do something else instead. Libertarian intellectual culture, by the same token, at times seems to take for granted that essentially all questions have...
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