Since Liberal Conspiracy started there have been people complaining that you CAN'T be Liberal AND left, and that the conflation of the two terms is a bad thing for linguistic accuracy. I agree with the latter part of that, but not the former: I think that saying the former shows a misunderstanding of both terms. Left is an economic marker; liberal a social one. If you are in the bottom left quadrant of the Political Compass, you are both. This is why I don't have a problem with Sunny using both terms in the description of the site (although, for the record, I don't think Sunny is a Liberal anywhere near as much as he is a leftie).

Anyway, Liberalism can be both right or left or neither. That does not make it any less Liberal. Liberalism is about a small state and freedom and a lack of intervention in the lives of individuals, yes, but that is by no means incompatible with the idea that the state helps to level the playing field FOR the individual against enormous powerful corporations, however unfashionable that opinion might be these days (mostly because the two main political parties are paid for by enormous powerful corporations...). Both the left and right can be authoritarian (indeed, in Britain, both the main theoretically left wing and right wing parties ARE authoritarian, no matter what their posturing), too.

John Stuart Mill was a leftie, and so was Adam Smith. I'm not ashamed to call myself a leftie economically, because (in my view) one cannot HAVE individual freedom without some constraints on the corporatist juggernaut, unless it is the freedom to starve. The thing is, in terms of what is important to my personal philosophy, leftieness is a tiny proportion of the whole. It's kind of leftie feminist liberal. I share Charlotte's disquiet with seeing the word Liberal in red, but I disagree that the solution to that is to abandon the term.

Being a Liberal is very important to me, and (rather like feminism) I would rather challenge people who use the term wrongly than let it be lost to authoritarians as it has been in the US.