How To Define Good Versus Bad Government

Classical liberalism, as Tyrrell states, originally "stood for adherence to individual liberty, to tolerance, to reason, and for many of us, to empiricism." The classic liberalism of a George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and the others known today as the Founding Fathers but one example, if the example most familiar to Americans.

Tyrrell cites this wonderful definition of classical liberalism given all the way back in 1873 by England's Sir William Harcourt, who made the point in a talk at Oxford. Liberty, said Harcourt,

…does not consist in making others do what you think is right. The difference between a free Government and a Government which is not free is principally this -- that a Government which is not free interferes with everything it can, and a free Government interferes with nothing except what it must. A despotic government tries to make everybody do what it wishes, a Liberal Government tries, so far as the safety of society will permit, to allow everybody to do what he wishes.