"Neo"liberal?

"... Como de costume, Mario Vargas Llosa di-lo melhor que ninguém.

I consider myself a liberal. I know many people who are liberals, and many more who are not.But, throughout a career that is beginning to be a long one, I have not known a single neoliberal.What does a neoliberal stand for? What is a neoliberal against? In contrast with Marxism, or the various kinds of fascism, true liberalism does not constitute a dogma, a closed and self-sufficient ideology with prefabricated responses to all social problems.Rather, liberalism is a doctrine that, beyond a relatively simple and clear combination of basic principles structured around a defense of political and economic liberty (that is, of democracy and the free market), welcomes a great variety of tendencies and hues. What it has not included until now, nor will it include in the future, is that caricature furnished by its enemies with the nickname neoliberal.

A "neo" is someone who pretends to be something, someone who is at the same time inside and outside of something. It is an elusive hybrid, a straw man set up without ever identifying a specific value, idea, regime, or doctrine. To say "neoliberal" is the same as saying "semiliberal" or "pseudoliberal." It is pure nonsense. One is either in favor of liberty or against it, but one cannot be semi-in-favor or pseudo-in-favor of liberty, just as one cannot be "semipregnant," "semiliving," or "semidead."

The term has not been invented to express a conceptual reality, but rather, as a corrosive weapon of derision. It has been designed to devalue semantically the doctrine of liberalism. And it is liberalism - more than any other doctrine - that symbolizes the extraordinary advances that liberty has made in the long course of human civilization."

Via Johan Norberg

- por HFerreira @ 00:15 (in insurgente)

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