Geoffrey Stone, a law professor at the University of Chicago, compiles a ten-point list of what it means to be a liberal and concedes that “not all liberals embrace all of these propositions, and many conservatives embrace at least some of them.”
Stephen Bainbridge, in The Communitarian Connundrum, takes issue with Stone’s sixth proposition, which reads (in part):
It is liberals who maintain that a national community is like a family and that government exists in part to “promote the general welfare.”
Bainbridge notes, “It is this communitarian aspect of modern liberalism, of course, which marks a principal difference between the modern version and classical liberalism.”
In A Dialogue with a Liberal, Arnold Kling also takes issue with that same point:
I believe that in reality what has helped the less fortunate is economic growth. Today’s elderly are affluent not because of Social Security, but because of all of the wealth created by private sector innovation over their lifetimes. Government involvement in health care and education is an impediment to progress in those fields. Job training and welfare are demonstrable failures. I think that treating a national community like a family is a grave intellectual error. A national unit is an institution that creates a legal framework for a large group of strangers to interact. A family is a small group that interacts on the basis of personal bonds. Strengthening government serves to weaken families and other vital civic institutions. If Professor Stone is truly as open-minded as he says, then he ought to examine what economists have found about the sources of economic growth and the ways that poverty has been alleviated over time.
He then presents his own list of libertarian propositions.