Today’s progressive liberals generally embrace policies from all over the ideological spectrum to support a vision of Nirvana.

As an example, they support Affirmative Action to achieve racial equity even though individual minority Asian children who have studied their brains out get bypassed in order to achieve quotas by college admission boards. Is that “fair” or just “equitable”. The same is true for government contractors (I ran a department that was 60% minorities, but I was asked to hire more Hispanics because we did not make a quota for Hispanics under our government contract).

If one wants to use past discrimination to justify these laws, then why are Asians not exempted from the quota limits as they were discriminated against out West where I live for more than hundred years, and some were even incarcerated. Affirmative action is a form of racism, but it is acceptable to progressive liberals as it achieves a social goal. But it violates the equal opportunity which is a goal of classical liberals.

So how would classical liberals approach the issue. First, offer all children attending a failing school system vouchers to attend good school system or provide alternative public charter schools. My brother founded one of these in Jersey City and his inner-city children including African American students are performing at levels competitive with suburban schools. The keys to his results are “more school” and safe schools.

In good schools, children from poorer homes often start off behind children from more affluent homes regardless of their skin color. The current affirmative action program dooms those white children for the color of their skin, when the answer is to offer those children “more school”. My brother results are based on children spending about 90 minutes more per day in school. By third to fourth grade the children have achieved parity with children from more affluent homes and can compete equally without racial preference even if they are poor white children.

In other words, the response should not factor in skin color, but rather address the underlying social issues that deprive children of “equal opportunity”.

One suggestion for addressing equal opportunity to avoid discrimination at the public university level is to put all applicants into two groups… qualified and not qualified based on objective criteria that does not consider race, gender, ethnicity, religion, etc. Then simply run a lottery system to decide who gets accepted.

This is a long response, and it only addresses one example of the difference between classical liberals like me and progressive liberals. But it highlights a core difference, classical liberals believe in equal opportunity and the goal is to try to fix “the system” to provide that… progressives believe in equal outcomes and so they “cheat” by using racism to achieve that. The progressives point to the outcomes and say they have made society better, but to the classical liberal the cost of “cheating” begins to build a generation of people who felt they were denied equal opportunity because of their skin color.

So how do you fix that, you start teaching “white guilt”, so they accept being discriminated against as “fair”. The whole thing eventually creates tension and conflict by avoiding the underlying issue of simply making sure children get a good education in the first place even if it means not in “community” public schools.

You are right, very few people believe in unregulated capitalism but there is a huge difference between where say classical liberals who embrace capitalism draw the line and progressives. Classical liberals would regulate businesses to promote safety and limit pollution (to protect life), anti-discrimination laws (to promote equal opportunity), and “anti-trust” laws to promote capitalism. Progressives are much more comfortable managing the economy to produce outcomes. They have a vision of the future and want to direct the economy towards that vision rather than simply establish “guardrails”. So, you are half right, that both progressives and classical liberals embrace regulation but with very different goals.

So, minimum wage is more likely a progressive issue where wages are forced to be higher. Classical liberals who embrace capitalism are more likely to promote economic growth that will create worker shortages and drive-up wages combined with equal opportunity to provide everyone access to those higher wages. With pushing up minimum wage, you create the unintended employer response of outsourcing work globally or replacing labor with automation. Worker shortages have a similar effect, but it takes place in an environment where there are not enough workers to begin with… so they can hopefully find other better paying jobs.

The theme is progressives see government as the tool of change and tend to use blunt force to change things… vaccine mandates being an example. Classical liberals who embrace capitalism don’t really believe in that approach, instead using the vaccine example, they provide “free vaccines” and “education” but pull up short of threatening someone’s livelihood who does not get vaccinated.