*THEY ALSO

For example, young women pay more for medical insurance than young men because pregnancy is expensive. I don’t think that’s fair. This is basically the moral argument behind rules like community rating.

Insurance is the function you are talking about, which levels out the background risks of living. I think everyone should have insurance, but I don’t think we should use violence to force everyone to do this.

Here’s the long answer:

The moral principle is that if nobody did anything to deserve more or less then the only fair result is for everyone to get the same. I have no problem with people getting a different result form others if they actually did something to deserve the difference.

So for some things like health care, you basically have this risk thrust upon you. You can’t choose not to take the risk. So it’s not fair for some to get lucky and others unlucky and be stuck with what you get.

There are some things like smoking that affect your health and you have control over. I have no problem with having to pay more for health insurance if you smoke.

So the stock market example is interesting. I hadn’t thought about it before. You choose to take a risk, but once you make that choice you have no control (or less than complete control) over the actual outcome. It doesn’t bother my moral sense for people to get different outcomes in that situation.

If I understand correctly, you’re saying if I invest everything I own in the stock market and lose it all, while my neighbor invests everything he owns in the stock market and makes bucket-loads, he has a responsibility to split the profit with me?

I would argue that eating expensive food for its status value, or eating some exotic delicacy for its exquisite taste or the adventure of doing something exotic is a completely different good from eating enough nutritious good tasting food to satisfy your hunger.

And “food” may be too broad a category. In a particular society it may be that hamburgers and chocolate bars are surplus goods, while caviar is a scarce good.

And I’m not saying that something must be provided in surplus to be a surplus good. I’m just saying that it is possible for a society to produce a surplus. Whether that society decides to do so depends on it’s economic system.

About the terms “liberal” and “libertarian” you are right that I am using their modern American meanings. “Liberal” used to mean laissez-faire in the days of Thomas Jefferson. I wasn’t aware “libertarian” was originally coined by anarcho-syndicalists.

But what’s important is what people mean by those words today. The meanings of words change over hundreds of years. If I went up to the man on the street and said “liberal” he would think big government and “libertarian” he would think free market. Do people elsewhere in the world still use those words with their original meanings? If so, then my posts are colored with American terminology, but people can still tell what I mean.

Your main point is a valid question. Aren’t we just inventing a new name for an ideology that already exists under a different name?

I don’t see my philosophy as matching up well with the current policies of the Democratic party here in America, which is who Americans would generally associate with reformist, regulated capitalism. The main difference is that it seems like democrats think it’s only natural for the government to be in charge of everything.

For example, I’m against laws requiring adults to wear seat belts, while democrats think the government should make people do what the government thinks is best for them. And in this latest economic bailout it seeems like democrats think the economy should be like an orchestra with the government as the conductor as opposed to a sports match with the government as referee.

So my views don’t match up well with the Democratic party, Republican party, or Libertarian party here in America. Perhaps if I lived somewhere else that had a parliamentary form of government I would be very happy voting for a minority party.

I’m probably not the first person to come up with these views and coin a name for them. But I didn’t know of any name in common usage that fit. I’ll read up more about the names “social democratism” and “reformism”. I think “keynesianism” is limited to just the economic sphere, and my scope is wider than that.

If there are any other political parties or movement names elsewhere in the world that you think describe what I’m saying I would like to know about them.

The american usage of “liberalism” and “libertarianism” are completely falsehood, as these definitions are exclusively american and revisions of the original meanings of liberalism and libertarianism.

Liberalism as ideology is grounded in the principles of the “free market”, complete deregulation, equal rights and such (a modern variation is “neoliberalism”).

“Libertarianism” originates from anarcho-syndicalism, which is an anti-authoritarian form of collectivism. Or, more widely called, anarchism, which sprung up as one of the poles in the left movements among marxism (anarchism is also an ideology being revised in american terminology).