Take a plastic bottle. In recent years, the European Union decided that bottle caps must be tethered to the bottle so they cannot be lost. The reasoning is not absurd — plastic caps do end up in oceans, and people do not always dispose of them responsibly. A solution was designed, debated, and eventually mandated. Most people either support this or do not care enough to object. But classical liberals look at this and see something beyond the cap itself. They see a government that has decided it knows better than the individual how to handle a piece of plastic, and has used its monopoly on law to enforce that judgment on everyone. The problem is not that the intention was bad. The problem is that good intentions have never been a reliable constraint on power.
This is the central concern that separates classical liberals from every other ideology in the political landscape. It is not that they think every policy on the left or the right is wrong in its goals. They share concerns with conservatives about economic freedom and with progressives about civil liberties. But they are the only political tradition that is primarily concerned with the power of government itself, prior to and independent of what that power is being used for in any given moment. Both the left and the right expand government authority when it serves their agenda, and both do so without seriously reckoning with what they are building for the long term. They assume their coalition will hold power long enough to justify the risk. History has a consistent answer to that assumption.
The core argument is this: Government power is monopolistic and centralized in a way that no other social institution is. When a market actor or a local community makes a mistake, the damage is contained. Other actors adapt, compete, or simply opt out. Government has no such corrective mechanism built into it. When it gets something wrong, or when it gets something right but then transfers that authority to someone with different intentions, everyone is subject to the consequences with no exit available. This asymmetry is why classical liberals insist on a high burden of proof before granting government any new power, not out of indifference to social problems, but out of a clear-eyed understanding that power granted for one purpose does not stay confined to that purpose.
Democracy is dynamic, and this is by design. Political majorities shift, administrations change, and the ideological character of government transforms over time. This means that any authority expanded under one government will eventually be inherited by another. The politician you trust with a particular tool today is not the one who will hold that tool in a decade. Classical liberals are not asking for distrust of any specific government. The argument is about the office, not the officeholder, because the office will not always be occupied by people who share your values or your intentions.
The Case of Hate Speech Laws
Few examples illustrate this problem as clearly as hate speech laws, precisely because the case for them is genuinely sympathetic. Speech causes real harm. It threatens and marginalizes people in ways that have very measurable consequences for their lives and participation in public life. The intuition that government, which we already ask to protect people from physical harm, should also protect them from this kind of damage is not an unreasonable one. Most people who support hate speech laws are not authoritarians. They are people who take seriously the harm that words can do.
But speech is not just one form of expression among others. It is the medium through which democratic life operates. It is how citizens form political opinions, how minority views eventually become majorities, how authority is challenged and power held accountable. Once government acquires the ability to define which speech is permissible, it acquires the ability to shape the political process from the inside. That is a qualitatively different kind of power from regulating commerce or maintaining infrastructure, and it is one that democratic systems are particularly ill-equipped to constrain after the fact.
The Soviet Union is the obvious historical reference. It did not begin by announcing totalitarian control over expression. It began by defining certain speech as destabilizing, as dangerous to national unity, as harmful to the collective good. The parallel to hate speech laws is not difficult to see. Once that framework existed, the operative question became who gets to define harm, and the answer was always the same: whoever currently holds power. The phrase "politically correct" did not enter the language as a piece of cultural satire. It described an actual enforcement standard with actual consequences for deviation.
What makes hate speech laws particularly susceptible to this dynamic is that the category resists objective definition. Harm is context-dependent and politically contested. A future administration does not need to repeal a hate speech law to weaponize it. It needs only to reinterpret it, bending the definition of harm toward whatever political convenience requires. The mechanism is already in place once the law exists. The only variable is who operates it. The harm hate speech causes is real. What classical liberals reject is the enforcement architecture, which creates a vulnerability in democratic governance that outlasts any particular administration's good intentions.
The Powers We Accept and Why
None of this leads to the conclusion that government should not exist or that all state power is equally suspect. There are functions that are genuinely monopolistic by nature, where decentralized alternatives are not just impractical but incoherent. A country cannot maintain competing armies without ceasing to be a country. A city cannot operate parallel sewage systems. National defense, law enforcement, and foundational infrastructure require centralized authority because the alternative is not a market of competing providers but the absence of the function entirely.
Classical liberals accept these powers not reluctantly as a concession but as a recognition of what certain problems actually require. The relevant question is always whether a decentralized alternative is viable, and for these core state functions, it is not. But accepting their necessity is entirely different from treating them as safe. The monopoly on violence that makes law enforcement possible is identical in kind to the monopoly that enables state tyranny. What separates a functional democracy from an authoritarian one is not the absence of centralized power but the framework within which that power operates.
This is why constitutional limits and genuine separation of powers are not decorative features of liberal democracy. They are its structural foundation. A constitution that clearly defines the scope of government authority, that requires broad consensus rather than simple majority to amend, and that protects individual rights from majoritarian pressure is the mechanism by which necessary powers are prevented from becoming catastrophic ones. Not every decision should be reversible by the government of the day. Some limits need to be entrenched precisely because they will be inconvenient to those in power, and that inconvenience is the point. A government constrained only by its own goodwill is not constrained at all.
The Slippery Slope Is Not a Fallacy
The slippery slope is usually invoked as a logical fallacy, a way of dismissing concerns about incremental expansion of government power as paranoid or alarmist. But the classical liberal position is not that any single intervention inevitably produces tyranny. It is that the normalization of a certain kind of reasoning — that government should act wherever a problem exists and a solution can be imagined — produces an institutional environment in which the scope of state power continuously expands and the threshold for intervention continuously falls.
The post-September 11 expansion of surveillance authority in the United States is a useful example because it was not just driven by bad intentions. The PATRIOT Act and the broader intelligence infrastructure built around it were genuinely understood by most of their architects as emergency measures, temporary responses to an extraordinary threat. What happened instead was that emergency powers became permanent, surveillance capabilities expanded well beyond their original justification, and legal frameworks built for counterterrorism were applied to ordinary domestic law enforcement. The emergency did not end the powers. It established them. And once established, those powers were available to every subsequent administration regardless of its character or priorities.
The EU regulatory record tells a parallel story at a different scale. What began as a project of market integration has, through decades of incremental expansion, produced a regulatory apparatus that now reaches into product design, agricultural practice, labor markets, digital services, and yes, the physical design of bottle caps. None of these individual interventions necessarily crossed a clear line. Each was justified on its own terms by reference to consumer protection, environmental concern, or market harmonization. The cumulative effect is a government with the authority and the institutional habit of intervening in almost any dimension of economic and social life when a sufficient rationale can be constructed. The rationale is never hard to construct.
This is the mechanism classical liberals are pointing to when they oppose even "well-intentioned" expansions of government power. It is not that the specific intervention will certainly be misused. It is that the intervention normalizes a standard of reasoning and leaves behind an institutional capability that future actors will inherit and extend. The question is not whether the current government will abuse the power. The question is whether the power should exist at all, given everything we know about how institutional authority accumulates and how political contexts change.
The Alternative
Classical liberals are not strict opponents of social organization or collective problem-solving. How problems are solved matters as much as whether they are solved. Markets, voluntary associations, local governance, and social norms are not second-best alternatives we accept because government is unavailable. They are genuinely preferable instruments for most social problems because deploying them requires no permanent transfer of authority to a centralized actor. A business that makes bad decisions loses customers. A voluntary association that fails its members dissolves. A local government that governs badly faces pressure from people who can compare it to neighboring jurisdictions or simply leave. None of these corrective mechanisms are available when the actor making decisions is the national state.
The deeper failure of both the contemporary left and the right is that they have largely abandoned this kind of institutional thinking. Both approach politics as a contest over who controls government power rather than a question of how much power government should have in the first place. Both build tools they intend for their own use without seriously considering that those tools will be inherited by their opponents. The left expands regulatory authority confident that it will be administered by people who share progressive values. The right builds executive power confident that it will be exercised by people with conservative ones. They are both right about the present and wrong about the future, and the cost of that error is borne by everyone.
Classical liberals occupy an unusual position in this landscape because they make an argument that cuts against the immediate interests of every political coalition. They are telling the left that the regulatory architecture it builds will eventually be used to protect corporate incumbents and suppress dissent. They are telling the right that the executive power it consolidates will eventually be wielded by administrations it finds intolerable. They are not popular messengers. But they are, on this point, correct. The bottle cap is a small and almost trivial example of a principle that is neither small nor trivial. Once you accept that good intentions justify intervention, you have surrendered the only principled basis for saying no to the next one. And there is always a next one.