Also, you only need to read a few articles in the Economist before coming across the phrase 'this newspaper believes' which should eradicate any suspicions of objectivity, pseudo or otherwise.
Examples?
If you want to understand Smith and Ricardo's views in full, I suggest that you read "An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations" and "On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation". There is simply no evidence in either of those books that the classical economists would support many policies outlined in "The Economist", other than free trade and free markets. The books describe more limited roles for government than you will find in the magazine.
It is equally obvious that the current classical, neoclassical, and Austrians have not and do not agree with "The Economist"'s advocacy for activist policies. Note: I view the Austrian school as the most evolved direct descendant of the classical school.
[1] Adam Smith-“The problem with fiat money is that it rewards the minority that can handle money, but fools the generation that has worked and saved money.” [2] http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/econ/ugcm/3ll3/ricardo/bullion
I agree with your definition of classical liberal, Economist doesn't subscribe to it.
In many countries it would evoke social liberal ideas, in others it would evoke more conservative liberal ideas, but most will be found to the left of our conservative parties an to the right of our socialist parties (and often to the right of our social democratic parties). Overall, the "gravitational point" of "classically liberal" parties is probably centre-right.
So from a European point of view, it is a "useful descriptor" to the extent it places someone in a fairly narrow range in the political centre vs. for example "libertarian" which today tends to evoke firmly right wing populist or laissez faire politics (despite the existence of plenty left wing libertarian ideologies, such as left-communism, minarchism or libertarian marxism, but these are rarely described as such, and in Europe at least rarely self-identify as libertarian).
No offense, but the same point could be put to your comment.
Personally, I find their positions to be refreshingly orthogonal to those of news organizations based in the US.
For instance, you can easily be in favor of personal liberty, and also want smaller government. Or you can be against abortion rights, and also want welfare programs for the poor. These things are in no way tied together by any philosophical reasoning.
Left and right are different motivations and different ways of seeing the world more than they are different policy platforms.
The left were people supporting the revolution. The right were people supporting the king.
The left were thus generally looking for change, and more freedoms, and formed the core of liberalism. With the rise of socialism, liberalism in Europe got confined around the centre.
But of course as you point out it is difficult to classify, as e.g. already back then socialism was by no means uniquely left wing (Marx criticised ideologies he considered as "feudal" or "reactionary" socialist ideologies that would fit on the right in the "classic" French left/right split, for example), and terms like libertarian also spans the full spectrum (you have libertarian Marxists, various anarchist tendencies, left-communism etc.).
If you consider a few axes, though, you get a good idea: - level of support for authority and personal freedoms (e.g. from no state at all to authoritarian state), level of protection of private property (e.g. no legal support for private property of means of production to considering protection of private property as one of the most important aspects of government), and level of secularism. Of course there's plenty of oddballs combinations.
> Or you can be against abortion rights, and also want welfare programs for the poor. > These things are in no way tied together by any philosophical reasoning.
You might be surprised. In Europe, most Christian parties fall centre-right to moderately conservative and tended to have separated out of either the conservative or liberal parties, or become the dominant force in their countries conservative parties, and do indeed often argue against abortion rights yet want welfare programs for the poor for clearly defined philosophical reasons.
The general philosophical reasoning for most of these parties in Europe can be shortened to "personal freedoms and personal responsibility, but not at the expense of christian morality", and the christian morality part both moderates the personal freedoms (abortion views etc.) and strengthens the social commitment (welfare). In Latin America, these parties tends to be more left wing. There's at least a century old tradition of "Christian democrat" thinking.
For specific information, I contact my foreign service located in the country I want info about, and sometimes other embassies like the UK embassy. Often you can just email them and receive back a surprisingly frank and accurate account on their economy and political situation. This is open to anybody generally. I was interested in setting up a small biz in Bulgaria so just contacted my countries' trade mission there and they sent me everything there is to know about the current situation there, including underground nightclub scenes in their publication about culture, I was pretty surprised how thorough it was.
When I get time I go on business school/university polisci dept websites and look at their press releases and research papers which come out steadily every week usually. Most professors write articles for the Guardian or other publications. The European, Australian, New Zealand, and Asian schools are the best, no pay walls.
Jewish publications typically write a lot about human rights status in various countries, so I check those too. http://www.cjnews.com/news/hungarian-filmmaker-fears-his-chi... is an article I found after my country decided to refuse refugee claims from Hungary, claiming it was 'safe'. No other media bothered to cover it hardly and just accepted the government's decree.
The workers, and everyone one else should otherwise be allowed to live their lives as freely as possible, as long as they don't try to usurp the gentry.