Liberal = Not Liberal ?

Belinda Luscombe, writing in Time describes George Akerlof as "more liberal than his wife [Janet Yellen]" and then goes on to quote Akerlof as saying "Our lone disagreement is that she is a bit more supportive of free trade than I."

Methinks that would make Yellen more liberal than Akerlof.

How have we come to the point where the less liberal position is described as the more liberal position?  That the word 'liberal' has become so corrupted that it is now used to mean the very opposite of liberal?

Quotation of the Day

From Steve Levitt in the latest Freakonomics Podcast, titled Are We Ready to Legalize Drugs? And Other FREAK-quently Asked Questions (emphasis added):

"And I do have a paper with Roland Fryer and a former student of mine, Paul Heaton, and Kevin Murphy.  And we set out to look at the crack epidemic and the costs of the crack epidemic from a purely practical perspective.  How bad was it?  Do the places that had a lot of crack, did really bad things happen there, and why?  And it was really interesting; it was really one of the most surprising results.  Because almost all of the big costs that we saw had to do not with the consumption of crack itself.  Consumption of crack had some negative effects, but they weren't great.  The really big social costs had to do with the prohibition of the legality of crack.  And so it was the case that the greatest costs we saw were the violence related to the fighting for property rights, and the imprisonment of people.  And it was interesting because it doesn't say that legalization is necessarily a good thing.  That’s a big jump to have.  But it says that in a regime where drugs are highly illegal, hard drugs like cocaine, in the U.S., the real costs that we feel then are the costs of the prohibition, not the costs of the use, because the prohibition is reasonably effective at lowering the use."

Quotation of the Day

From The Road to Serfdom by F.A. Hayek, Routledge Classics Edition, Chapter 15 "The Prospects of International Order" (page 242):

"We shall never prevent the abuse of power if we are not prepared to limit power in a way which occasionally may also prevent its use for desirable purposes."

Happy New Year!