The world would not be quite so riven with death and destruction if Americas political elite had better taste in music. Classic rock, for instance, is a fraud. It never existed. Jimmy Page never turned to Robert Plant and said, Hey, lets start a classic rock band. Led Zeppelin did not imagine itself to be part of a sonic movement that included Billy Joel that idea came from corporate radio gurus in the 1980s, and they called their marketing concoction classic rock.

The same is true for classical liberalism, a moniker currently en vogue among a particular right-wing set that would very much like to be described as intellectuals, including House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), New York Times opinion editor Bari Weiss and YouTuber Dave Rubin .

Classical liberalism is the idea that individual freedom and limited government are the best way for humans to form a free society, Rubin said in a recent video , citing great thinkers such as Adam Smith, John Locke and John Stuart Mill.

Alas, the term classical liberal would have been novel to Smith, Locke or Mill. Mill called himself a socialist, Locke called for a state ban on Catholicism, and Smith favored all manner of encroachments against the free market. The corporate radio gurus of political theory Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman popularized the notion that these thinkers represent a coherent, libertarian-esque school of thought in the 20th century.

Over the years, these men debated a handful of different names for the intellectual movement they organized classical liberalism, neoliberalism (now a slur in Democratic Party circles) and libertarianism (now a particularly aggressive strain of the classical liberal bug), among others. They traced their lineage back to Smith et al., but their political vision was contemporary and unique, insisting that unfettered markets offered a better path to social deliverance than the unpredictable currents of political democracy.

Just as you should avert your ears from any band in the 21st century calling itself classic rock, so too should you be alarmed by todays purveyors of classical liberalism. Whatever classical liberals say about their ideas, in practice they have always functioned as a respectable intellectual veneer for authoritarian politics.

In his 1927 book Liberalism (reissued with the subtitle In The Classical Tradition in 1962), Mises applauded Benito Mussolinis Fascist Party and similar movements aiming at the establishment of dictatorships across Europe, saying they had, for the moment, saved European civilization, a merit that would live on eternally in history. In the 1970s, Hayek defended his decision to advise Chilean butcher Augusto Pinochet by saying he would prefer a liberal dictator to democratic government lacking liberalism in the classical sense, mind you.

But the most influential of the original classical liberals was Friedman. One of National Review founder William F. Buckleys skiing buddies, Friedman was a brilliant economist who focused much of his career on providing statistical evidence that government efforts to solve problems really just made them worse. Medical licensing for doctors, he argued, ultimately raised costs for patients. Rent control inevitably made housing more expensive.