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For me, liberals are people who seek to use government to promote the general welfare.
I want to get away from "It's either government or the market." That's a false dichotomy.
Markets, and the way they operate can't be frozen in time and place. A dynamic economy that is growing and increasing material well-being for a large number of people have to change over time.
You can't have a market without government, because governments create the rules of competition and enforce fairness in the markets, and they build the institutions within which competition takes place.
I think liberals have to come to terms with the market and embrace market mechanisms as the only way to run a society that produces widespread material well-being and respects individual rights and liberties.
The United States, after all, was founded by men of liberal sentiment who were seeking to promote the greatest good for the greatest number, by creating a constitutional order for the creation and expansion of liberty.
Globalization, meaning the global expansion of a market economy, is the only way we can guarantee widespread prosperity and peace. A lot of nations are just so small, that unless they can sell their goods and services on the market they're never going to develop, they don't have an internal market that's big enough to sustain anything.
Markets are a social construction, they're made from institutions. We in a democratic society create markets, we constitute markets, we bring them into existence, and we shouldn't turn markets over to a narrow group of people who regulate them and run them in their interests, rather they should be run democratically for the common good.