Are you a liberal? Read on…
“Classical liberalism" is the term used to designate the ideology advocating:
• private property;
• an unhampered market economy;
• the rule of law;
• embrace of personal choice with constitutional guarantees of freedom of religion, of the press, and of association; and,
• international peace based on free trade.
Up until around 1900, this ideology was generally known simply as liberalism. The qualifying "classical" is now usually necessary.
It is the socialist state that classical liberalism has opposed most vigorously. The Austro-American Ludwig von Mises, for example, demonstrated the impossibility of rational central planning.
Classical liberalism is often contrasted with a new “social liberalism” (aka, progressivism), which is supposed to have developed out of the classical variety around 1900. But social liberalism deviates fundamentally from its namesake at its theoretical root in that it denies the self-regulatory capacity of society: the state is called on to redress social imbalance in increasingly ramified ways.
Progressives plead that they intends to preserve the end of individual freedom, modifying only the means. To classical liberals this is hardly to the point — as much could be claimed for most varieties of socialism.
In fact, social liberalism/progressivism can scarcely be distinguished, theoretically and practically, from revisionist socialism.
Words matter. Reclaim our language.
sauce: https://mises.org/library/what-classical-liberalism