Liberty: Do any mainstream American polictical parties really oppose it?

That's an exercise in futility because liberty is too subjective a term.
What's more important ? My liberty to keep/spend all of my money or a young man'S liberty to go to college although he couldn't afford the tuition in a privatised education system ?

True that. Another example is pollution. If companies have Liberty to pollute then that takes people's freedom to have clean water/air/land.
 
Here's a cartoon from 65 years ago for everyone who forgot what liberty and freedom means.

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That cartoon is so outdated and simplistic that it is delightfully anachronistic. Patent medicines have all but disappeared due to governmental regulations to protect the public from outrageous claims and actually harmful substances frequently found in them. Unions are considered to be reprehensible by many right-wingers who give lip service to freedom and liberty, instead being of an essential aspect to maintaining a healthy balance between employers and employees.

But one thing does remain essentially unchanged. "Isms" are still the bogeymen of many who use fear mongering and paranoia to try to control the "sheeple", while claiming this country is far superior to others because we have "freedom" and "liberty". That is just as long as we live and act as they wish us to do.
 

http://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbar...des-long-upward-march-of-government-spending/



Government gets a little bigger every year to me. 0.24% bigger.
Employees are a bad metric.



Government is doing less, but for a larger number of people. So employees are a much better metric than dollars. More people are elderly and retired every year. More people are poor every year. If you want an absolute cut in dollars, then you have to find a way to make an every larger share of the American population accept that they no longer live in a developed nation.

After all, once most Americans are as poor as most Mexicans, there won't be an immigration problem any more.
 
Debt aside, most Americans still have much higher standards of living. But for a growing share of Americans that isn't true, or the only thing standing in the way of it being true is welfare.

Cut the welfare spending and America too could be a third world country.
 
Neither of the parties are against liberty or, at least, no person is working against what their concept of liberty is. The phrase is so poorly defined that it's not unusual for two people to have definitions that are not just different, but incompatible.

I lose a bit of respect for a person when they criticism something for being anti-liberty. It's an argument that takes their subjective notion of liberty and treats it as an objective truth and, in doing so, calls in to doubt the integrity and intelligence of people who don't share that definition
 
So do Democrats and pretty much everyone else. It's naive to think that this can easily be reduced to one party, for if that were true, we wouldn't be discussing the USA right now. A badly informed populace does not make informed decisions.
To be entirely fair, Democratic fear-mongering is at least least loosely based in reality. They talk about things like welfare, the job market, discrimination- bread and butter stuff, basically, and which generally reflect the logical (if not necessarily the likely) outcome of Republican policies. Republican fear-mongering, in contrast, tends to revolve around narratives of cultural decline and impending federal tyranny (often verging on conspiracy, to the understandable embarrassment of moderate Republicans), and appeals not to the honest concerns of the precarious poor, but to the cultural neuroses of a white middle class in decline.

Now, I don't think that this is a matter of virtue on the part of the Democrats or of wickedness on the part of the Republicans, so much as it reflects their respective social bases. (In both camps, cynicism is the rule.) The Democrats primarily appeal to the traditionally-subordinate parts of society- the poor, the young, minorities, etc.- whose concerns lean heavily towards the everyday, while the Republicans primarily appeal to the traditionally-dominant parts of society, who while hardly lacking their own everyday concerns, have more time to fret about their declining social hegemony. But it's a real distinction, and one worth remembering.
 
I believe this is supremely relevant.
 
Do they even understand it any more? Seems like it's been downgraded to a last resort argument for egoism.
 
This subject comes up frequently in campaign rhetoric. Why does it carry any weight if the premise is false?

Because people often vote based more on affirming their identity than policy issues. And, as reinforcement, decades of demonization may have convinced some people that being "pro-freedom" is an excellent they can differentiate themselves from the Other.
 
I think the biggest obstacle to liberty in a capitalist society is the tendency to accumulate debt instead of wealth. How many candidate run on a platform of fixing issues with personal debts?

No, you got it all wrong. You have to have the freedom to accumulate debt!

"Liberty" is way too broad of an idea for someone really to oppose or support it.

This.
 
You're going to have to walk me through that reasoning.

A religious organization should have the liberty to deny its members the liberty of having a choice on whether or not to get an abortion. Freedom maximized!
 
A religious organization should have the liberty to deny its members the liberty of having a choice on whether or not to get an abortion. Freedom maximized!

Oh like a religious organization should have the liberty to stop girls from going to school!
 
Freedom is slavery.

"Liberty" is a nonsensical campaign point as it is empty rhethoric, completely arbitrary and not really something archievabe.
 
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