Thanks for the caution, Mitch.

There is so much to address in just that label that I have, as a start, decided to address the label issue a bit with an excerpt from Murray Rothbard’s For a New Liberty.

One of the ways that the new statist intellectuals did their work was to change the meaning of old labels, and therefore to manipulate in the minds of the public the emotional connotations attached to such labels. For example, the laissez- faire libertarians had long been known as ?liberals,? and the purest and most militant of them as ?radicals?; they had also been known as ?progressives? because they were the ones in tune with industrial progress, the spread of liberty, and the rise in living standards of consumers.

The new breed of statist academics and intellectuals appropriated to themselves the words ?liberal? and ?progressive,? and successfully managed to tar their laissez- faire opponents with the chargeof being old-fashioned, ?Neanderthal,? and ?reactionary.?

Even the name ?conservative? was pinned on the classical liberals. And, as we have seen, the new statists were able to appropriate the concept of ?reason? as well.

If the laissez- faire liberals were confused by the new recrudescence of statism and mercantilism as ?progressive? corporate statism, another reason for the decay of classical liberalism by the end of the nineteenth century was the growth of a peculiar new movement: socialism. Socialism began in the 1830s and expanded greatly after the 1880s. The peculiar thing about socialism was that it was a confused, hybrid movement, influenced by both the two great preexisting polar ideologies, liberalism and conservatism. From the classical liberals the socialists took a frank acceptance of industrialism and the Industrial Revolution, an early glorification of ?science? and ?reason,? and at least a rhetorical devotion to
such classical liberal ideals as peace, individual freedom, and a rising
standard of living.

Indeed, the socialists, long before the much later
corporatists, pioneered in a co-opting of science, reason, and industrialism.
And the socialists not only adopted the classical liberal adherence to
democracy, but topped it by calling for an ?expanded democracy,? in
which ?the people? would run the economy?and each other.

Update: from the section titled “The Libertarian Heritage,” manuscript p. 13.