“There was a word that I always liked; the classical economists used it: liberal. The word liberal really meant, in the classical sense, the liberalization of the individuals from the tyranny of the State. That word was expropriated by our opponents and it has now come to mean liberality with other people’s money. The word was taken over. And so I, more than anybody else, was responsible for introducing and publicizing and perhaps making world-wide the word libertarian. . .
I am sorry I ever did it. Why? Because the word libertarian has now been just as much expropriated as the word liberal.”
Leonard E. Reed (1965)