RALEIGH – As a fellow Liberal Democrat, I was pleased to see Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi win an overwhelming mandate for his political program of privatizing government programs, cutting taxes, reforming entitlements, and staying the course in Iraq.
What’s especially funny about the sentence I just wrote is that, in almost every country on the globe except the United States, the sentence wouldn’t be considered funny at all. It is routinely assumed in places such as Eastern Europe, the Middle East, or portions of Latin America that a Liberal Democrat is someone who believes in popular sovereignty, rather than rule by unelected elites, and in smaller, less intrusive government. Although the history of Koizumi’s the Liberal Democratic Party is complex and not entirely liberal in the classical, Lockean sense, this dynamic Japanese leader seems to be moving his faction in a direction that John Locke, for one, might have found most congenial.
American liberalism is what doesn’t make any terminological sense. Liberals in former Soviet republics are the ones who believe in free markets and individual liberty. Liberals in the Middle East argue that true Islamic piety does not preclude, and indeed may welcome and endorse, free institutions such as unfettered markets and elected governments. Liberals are, and should be, about constraining the size and scope of government.
In Koizumi’s case, his hastily called parliamentary election has as its proximate cause an proposal that Milton Friedman or Ronald Reagan might well have championed in their day: privatizing the Japanese post office. It does far more than deliver the mail. Over the years, it became a lending institution and insurer with generous government protections and subsidies. In what should have been a predictable result, for anyone familiar with government “economic development” initiatives, Japan Post used this authority to acquire $3 trillion in savings and insurance deposits and then used its leverage to, well, screw up royally (or should that be “imperially”) the nation’s economy through insider deals and pork-barrel projects.
Koizumi tried to push a privatization plan through the previous Diet, but ran into opposition within his own party as well as outside it. Rather than walking away dejectedly from the table, he rolled the dice again – winning a large majority, crushing the main opposition party, and gaining momentum not just for the privatization but also for larger changes in Japan’s welfare state to bring its unfunded promises in line with fiscal realities (sound familiar). In addition, opponents tried to make inroads by criticizing the government’s decision to send troops to Iraq. That effort flopped, too, and there is now talk that Koizumi may finally be able to amend the constitution to allow greater freedom to deploy Japanese forces to assist its allies in important military tasks.
As I have told audiences and reporters on numerous occasions, I would dearly love to reclaim the term “liberal” from the modern American Left who have so abused and distorted it. They’re not using it anymore, anyway, now that they have again become enamored with the vaguely elitist euphemism of “progressive.” Could we true freedom-lovers have “liberal” back? Alas, this does not seem to be in the cards.
So I’ll have to continue to be a libertarian conservative who runs an organization named after the father of political liberalism. Don’t sweat it – it’s confusing to me, too.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.