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To be or not to be… liberal

Roland Hill; Foreword by Owen Chadwick ISBN: 9780300079562

 

Now, that it looks like a national sport to fight against liberal policies and in a time when, to be called neoliberal looks like a short for: «insensitive monster that it is fully devoted to increase his money just for the lust of his own profit regardless of how much suffering is he causing to the other human beings» I would like to recover, some sentences from an extraordinary person, born in the XVIII century; Lord Acton; a Liberal:

  • «Great men are almost always bad men.»
  • “The strong man with the dagger is followed by the weak man with the sponge.”
  • “There is not a soul who does not have to beg alms of another, either a smile, a handshake, or a fond eye.”
  • “Be not content with the best book; seek sidelights from the others; have no favourites.”
  • “Where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control. History has proven that. All power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
  • «The issue which has swept down the centuries and which will have to be fought sooner or later is the people versus the banks.»
  • «The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern: every class is unfit to govern.»
  • «Liberty is not the power of doing what we like, but the right to do what we ought.»
  • «There is no error so monstrous that it fails to find defenders among the ablest men.»

The point is: it is not important whether a policy is neoliberal or not. What it really matters is the power that we have when we plan policies for our fellow countrymen, and the care and the empathy that we have for the recipients of this policies.
Thus we have to keep away the politicians from the power and to aprox the administration to the people. The goal of a new european political party is to think and plan, but not to rule. The party has to select the best ones outside from the political  sphere that will have to aply its ideas and run the public administration.