altruist , the only money government has to give is what it had already taken, minus most of it as a handling fee. Government cannot create wealth, it can only destroy it. Government can only make society as a whole poorer, while making the government-connected insider elites richer through extortion, theft, and grants of monopoly and other priviledge.

Nor is there anything altruistic about "charity" via the barrel of a gun.

The terms "left" and "right" in the political sense go back to 1789 in France. When the French Estates-General (États-Généraux) met on May 6, 1789, the Third Estate commoners, who wanted less taxes and government control (i.e., "laissez-faire"), were seated on the left side of King Louis XVI, and the Second Estate nobles and First Estate clergy, who were the conservatives and wanted to maintain the government's power, sat on his right. (Prior to the May 1789 convention of the French Estates-General [the first meeting of which was on May 5, 1789], the last time the Estates-General had met was under King Louis XIII from October 27, 1614 to February 23, 1615.)

Also, "liberal" originally meant what we would call today (at least in the U.S. and Canada) "libertarian," i.e., laissez-faire free market, less taxes, less regulation, and gun ownership by the common people. Thus, in the original sense of the words, someone who wanted no taxes, all drugs to be legal, a free market, and armament of the common people would be a left-wing liberal.

The term "liberal" as it is commonly used today is purely and simply a misnomer meaning the opposite of what it originally meant, as those commonly called "liberals" today are about giving government more power, not in stripping government of power. Those commonly called "liberals" today are in fact *right-wing conservatives* in the original sense of that political term. So also, socialism and communism are exceedingly *right-wing* and *conservative* political philosophies, as they put all power into the hands of government, rather than strip government of power.

Of course, this change in the meaning of liberalism (such that today it means the opposite of what it originally meant) was by no accident. Authentic liberalism represents the only genuine threat to statism (i.e., right-wing conservatism, in the original sense of the term), and due to liberalism's triumphs in gaining the intellectual high-ground during the 19th century, it was necessary for the ruling elite to subvert the liberal agenda if they were to survive. The ruling elite did this by sabotaging the very meaning of the terms "liberalism" and "left-wing"--such that these terms now popularly mean the opposite of what they once did--via bankrolling and promoting self-termed "liberal" court intellectuals who in fact promote the right-wing, conservative agenda, i.e., statism, i.e., collectivism. Thus, in doing this, the ruling elite succeeded in changing the meaning of their oppositional philosophy to a philosophy that supports their empowerment! That is, the ruling elite created another branch of right-wing conservatism, nowadays called by the misnomer "liberalism," so also by the names of socialism and communism.

For the history on how the "capitalist" (i.e., mercantilist) elite in the West bankrolled Communism, see the below two scholarly and voluminously-documented works:

Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, Prof. Antony C. Sutton (1974):

http://reformed-theology.org/html/books/bolshevik_revolution/index.html

The Best Enemy Money Can Buy, Prof. Antony C. Sutton (1986):

http://reformed-theology.org/html/books/best_enemy/index.html

http://www.mega.nu:8080/ampp/sutton_best_enemy/index.html

See the below work on how the U.S. ruling elite funded National Socialism in Germany, even illegally during war-time:

Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler, Prof. Antony C. Sutton (1976):

http://reformed-theology.org/html/books/wall_street/index.html

http://www.mega.nu:8080/ampp/sutton_wall_street/index.html

See also the below post by me:

"Recommended Reading Concerning Political and Economic Theory," September 30, 2005:

http://www.armleg.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4&mforum=libertyandtruth

____________
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."--H. L. Mencken