The Three Positions

"Liberalism" originally meant what we now call libertarianism -- limited government, free people, and free markets.  Its opposite was "conservatism," which sought to preserve traditional institutions of government, religion, social class relations, etc.

The core of what's called liberalism today is the creation and enforcement of equality through the power of government; that's the essential socialist position, and it's antithetical to liberalism in its original, libertarian meaning. Today's liberals want to enforce equality of results, while the original liberal understanding was that the power of government should only be used to create greater equality of opportunity by lowering the barriers to individual accomplishment.

Today's conservatism is problematic because it tries to do two things at the same time: To allow maximum economic freedom, which inevitably creates lots of inequality, but also to use government power to enforce a social agenda. It's hard to be convincing in your talk about liberty when you are also out to control people's private reproductive behavior.

The terminology is incoherent because, as Hayek pointed out, there are not two positions -- Liberal vs. Conservative, to be distinguished as if they are the end points of an ideological straight line, with perhaps its center point labeled "Moderate."  In reality there are three positions, and when you try to cram the three into two, you get a mess.

The three positions are (1) Conservatism, (2) Socialism, and (3) Libertarianism.  Imagine a triangle with those three as its corners. Any point inside the triangle will be some different mix of the three. Any attempt to squash the triangle into a line only creates the terminological mess we have, which makes all political discussion incoherent.  This is why both sides constantly complain that their position is being treated superficially, and why both sides end up talking past each other.

I like to think about the differences in evolutionary terms:

Conservatism is anti-evolution:  What exists has by definition succeeded even if it is not perfect. History demonstrates that change runs the risk of making things worse, perhaps much worse, so we need to recognize good enough as good enough.

Socialism is guided evolution:  Only certain kinds of change should be encouraged or allowed, specifically change that creates or promotes greater equality. If we ever achieved perfect equality, there would be no need or reason for further change -- Marx's "End of History."

Libertarianism is free market evolution:  Our information is so limited that we only stumble around in the dark when we try to stop change or direct it. We may believe that equality is the highest social good, but we may be completely mistaken about that. The best we can do is to encourage the widest possible experimentation and innovation, treating every status quo as provisional pending future developments and data. The best way we have so far found to do that is to let the profit motive function in a free market -- which is basically how natural selection operates in nature.