This is the third in a series in which we are examining the basic philosophies at work in politics, just for the fun of it. How many columns will be included in the series is anybody's guess.

Necessity is the mother of invention.

A hackneyed phrase, to be sure, but it's central to a system of belief that has helped make this nation great, in my opinion.

Human nature being what it is, most of us can call up an amazing amount of ingenuity and inspiration if we know that we must rely on those qualities to survive and prosper. Likewise, if we think someone else is going to see to it that we will survive, we are less likely to reach into our own reservoir of talents and more likely to let George do it.

And if George is taking care of our basic need for food, shelter and clothing, after awhile we forget what it was like to think for ourselves, and our main mental focus is on figuring out how to get George to provide some creature comforts as well.

We talk a great deal about individual rights and responsibilities as defining tenets of our democratic republic, along with the ideal of strong local governments with a somewhat weaker central government. But we sometimes forget that a belief in self reliance also helped mold our society and our system of government.

It's the idea that people should take care of themselves, and that to deny them the privilege of making their own way in the world is to deprive them of basic human dignity.

The flip side of that concept is the belief that those who work harder, come up with better ideas and take risks that pay off should be allowed to enjoy the rewards of their extra efforts without being forced to share them. Remove the possibility of increasing rewards, and once again human nature takes over. We won't work harder and smarter just to see the increased wealth we've generated given to someone else.

That's why you don't see the technological advances, the medical breakthroughs, the better mousetraps coming from socialistic or communistic societies. The best that you can hope for in such societies is that people will do their duty in a workmanlike manner.

Enforced mediocrity.

For most of the history of this country, we have lived by the basic concepts of self reliance and keeping what you earn, and we have prospered far beyond what anyone could have hoped for.

We developed a concept known as free enterprise, the idea that you can come up with a product or service, either by inventing it or by buying it, and can sell that product or service to others and then earn a profit based upon how much demand you can generate and how much competition you face, and you get to keep that profit to use anyway you see fit. In the words of Russian-born comedian Yakov Schmirnoff, "What a country!"

We set up a collection of autonomous states, and a central (federal) government designed not to govern the states, but to provide for the common defense, to regulate commerce between the states and to protect the rights of individuals under the Constitution.

The concepts of "liberal" and "conservative" are hard to pin down, because they've had so many different definitions over the decades and because they are often misused even in today's context. But essentially, we who wear the label conservative today believe strongly in those founding principles of free enterprise and self reliance, and we believe that those founding principles are threatened by a creeping socialism that is moving the nation toward mediocrity and undermining our individual liberties.

We use the word "liberal," in my opinion, because we are afraid to use the proper label "socialist" to describe what has happened to our governmental system during much of this century. We're afraid because we don't want to be accused of McCarthyism, but McCarthy died a long time ago. It's time to start saying what we mean.

If you want to know what I mean by socialism, read last week's column. It's available on our Web page.

I suspect that many thousands perhaps millions of people who proudly wear the liberal label would more properly be called libertarian in today's parlance. They believe in individual liberty and oppose government regulation of what they feel should be private decisions.

Then there are the liberals/moderates who believe that we should dilute our ideals of free enterprise, that the central government should take a more active role in our lives and spend more of our incomes, to distribute the wealth a little more evenly. The size of the gap between rich and poor worries these people a great deal, and they want to "do something" about a variety of ills that exist in society and they want to use your income to do it.

If you've followed me this far, liberals, don't fear that this is going to turn into a "slam the liberals" treatise. There are some basic moral beliefs behind liberalism, and I am in total agreement with many of them.