A few years ago, I had a coworker who was particularly incompetent and particularly a pain in the butt.  It wasn't just that she had bad ideas a plenty about our company but it was the way she'd argue her points that was particularly irksome.  There's one memorable email exchange I remember having with her and our mutual boss concerning some strategic product direction or another.   He asked us to summarize our core differences of opinion and report back so he could make a more clinical, fact-based decision between the 2 options.   The first line of her email back to him deserves to live in inter-office-memo infamy -

"Basically, my plan is to make the company stronger, make more revenue and our product line more strategic."

End of sentance.   The not so subtle implication - "Vinod's plan makes the company weaker, and provides less revenue."  And that's all you needed to know.

Aside from this statement of imputed motives there was little actual description of the substantive differences in our respective plans just (more of) her expounding on her ideas.  Afterall, if she was so fully an ally of Good, then there was only one thing that I could be.   Blech.   And what an utterly juvenile way of debating a point and trying to make meaningful distinctions.

So with that frame, I now present an article by one Dr. Geoffrey Stone - a law professor at University of Chicago no less - with 10 points concerning "What it means to be liberal."  A few snippets below -

1. Liberals believe individuals should doubt their own truths and consider fairly and open-mindedly the truths of others...

2. Liberals believe individuals should be tolerant and respectful of difference...

3. Liberals believe individuals have a right and a responsibility to participate in public debate...

And so on.   You get the point.  In otherwords, Liberals believe in these Good Things and, by implication the other side must believe the opposite.  More Blech.   The hopefully-obvious problem is that you'd be very hard pressed to find Conservatives / Libertarians / Others who'd sincerely acccept the converse of any of these statements -- "non liberals don't consider fairly or open mindedly the truths of others"?  "non-liberals believe individuals should be intolerant and hate difference"? 

Without a mutually understood converse, there's no productive debate.   And, at best, these sorts of statements merely reveal a lot about how Dr. Stone perceives his opponents.  

A few prominent libertarian web personalities have taken Dr. Stone to task with their own top 10 lists and seem to present more "controvertible" differences.   While not perfect examples, they do make a stronger attempt than Dr. Stone.  For example, one of my perenniel favorites - Arnold Kling -

4. Corporate power is adequately checked by market forces.. [--> implication, the other side fears the sort of corporate power wielded by Wal-Mart, Microsoft, etc.]

6. Government is just one of many institutions for collective action. ...  [--> implication, the other side believes government is the primary / best institution for collective action]

Stephen Bainbridge, also writing at TCS also provides a great example of teasing out the *real* differences between the Liberal and Libertarian positions -

[Stone -->] It is liberals who maintain that a national community is like a family and that government exists in part to "promote the general welfare."

[Bainbridge-->]It is this communitarian aspect of modern liberalism, of course, which marks a principal difference between the modern version and classical liberalism. I suspect it is this over-broad understanding of what it means to be a community that is one of the things conservatives and libertarians steeped in the classical liberal tradition find most off-putting about modern liberalism.

In other words, Liberals far more quickly equate the "national community" with a "big family" while libertarians make tremendous distinctions between the roles / rights / responsibilities at all levels.  It's not that libertarians necessarily disagree with certain Good goals (for ex., helping the poor), they would just allocate efforts differently (less government, more Salvation Army) -- a distinction totally ignored in Dr. Stone's list. 

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