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hijacking of the term to describe a political philosophy
that is antithetical to its original meaning.
LIBERALISM AND CRONYISM
John Locke, an early liberal thinker, used the concept of
self-ownership as a foundation for developing his political
philosophy. 2 People own themselves, Locke argued,
and therefore own their labor. When people combine
their labor with unowned resources, the product of their
labor becomes their property. Locke established a moral
foundation for the market economy based on the political
foundation of individual rights. The idea of individual
rights is generally accepted in the twenty-first century,
but it was a revolutionary idea when Locke put it forward
in the seventeenth century. The Founding Fathers often
cited Locke’s ideas as the intellectual foundation for the
American and French Revolutions that followed toward
the end of the eighteenth century. 3
The revolutionary nature of Locke’s liberal ideas
becomes apparent when contrasted with the ideas of
Thomas Hobbes, who wrote a few decades earlier that the
only way to escape from a life of anarchy, where life would
be “nasty, brutish, and short” and a war of all against all,
was to establish a society where everyone obeyed the
rules of the sovereign. 4 The sovereign was the political
ruler, and could be a king, a dictator, or a democratically
elected government. Hobbes argued that whatever the
form or ruler, everyone had to obey the government to
prevent chaos and anarchy. In Hobbes’s view, the government
granted rights and people were obligated to obey
the government’s rules. Locke, however, saw a world
LAYING A FOUNDATION 7