Any concept, or ideal, pursued beyond its own worth becomes burdensome. You see liberty as some sort of panacea that would solve all of the world's problems, and i do not disagree that respect for the dignity of the individual and their capacity for self-governance is important to maintaining our happiness. However we must be aware that one man's freedom can create another man's misery, quite easily. One man's right to property, broadly interpreted, could mean the effective serfdom of thousands or millions as that man uses monopoly powers in the market place to dominate the market-sphere and repress those under his domain.
Liberalism needs restrictions to check the excesses of those who would take their freedom and do evil with it within the bounds of a so-called "liberal" system. These restrictions need not jump off some slippery slope into Bolshevism or Nazism, this is an over-simplistic view of the world.
In addendum, look at what the various socialist policies have done in America and Western Europe. They have checked the excesses of robber-baron style capitalism by helping to enforce minimum living standards across the board. How much has social unrest diminished in America since the New Deal, or how much more stable have Western European societies become since the early 20th century? The "consequentialist" evils of the 20th century were a reaction to the rapaciousness of 19th-century liberalism: the Marxists were those who had always been poor and merely saw the serf-lord replaced by the mill owner as the master of their fate. The Fascists were those small producers who had had some measure of success in the old system, crushed by an unfeeling marketplace against which they could not hope to compete.
Monster Hunter: pissing me off since 2010.
