Liberalism vs socialism
Concluding paragraph from the excellent Stanford Encyclopedia article on liberalism:
Given that liberalism fractures on so many issues — the nature of liberty, the place of property and democracy in a just society, the comprehensiveness and the reach of the liberal ideal — one might wonder whether there is any point in talking of ‘liberalism’ at all. It is not, though, an unimportant or trivial thing that all these theories take liberty to be the grounding political value. Radical democrats assert the overriding value of equality, communitarians maintain that the demands of belongingness trump freedom, and conservatives complain that the liberal devotion to freedom undermines traditional values and virtues and so social order itself. Intramural disputes aside, liberals join in rejecting these conceptions of political right.
When push comes to shove, my view is that freedom is more important than equality (though gross inequality is itself a threat to freedom). Hence I find “liberal” a better label for my views than “socialist” (or “radical democrat”, to use Stanford’s circumlocution).
