True, but if I can offer a possible interpretation of his statement that would make more sense, let me say that liberals often do decide to work through the government rather than through individual responsibility, in every case that I can think of. Every time a liberal cause bubbles to the surface it is generally accompanied by a flurry of interest in getting the government to "do something". A lot of times the cause may be just but when the tool used to achieve it isn't a public consensus but rather government coercion, I see it as a great evil.
As an example, I know many people that fervently wish there was less drug abuse, but setting up a draconian mechanism that imprisons tens of thousands of people and costs many more people their jobs, homes, and most everything else isn't the way to achieve that wish. Nor is mandatory "education programs" paid for with money stolen through taxation.
As a side note, I generally try to avoid using polarizing terms like "liberal". While the term itself may be an accurate description of a particular person and/or their position, I find it is more often than not used as a pejorative, and a lazy one at that. It is intended to cause an immediate and emotional reaction in the listener, and cause the person facing the suspected "liberal" to assume their ideas fit into a neat position. More evidence of the polarizing effect government has on honest debate, but thats another story.
A "liberal" in the classic sense is not much different than the paleo version of a conservative. A simple comparison would be to say the paleoliberal wants personal freedom guaranteed by government, whereas the paleoconservative wants the same, just with much smaller government. Both of them compare favorably to the neolibs and neocons, each of which are offshoots of truly dangerous people, the Progressives. That movement arose in the very late 19th century and counts such luminaries as Teddy Roosevelt amongst their numbers. Their doctrines included eugenics and protofacism. They preached a collective welfare that was the root of today's public education, military interventionism, monetary policy, and elimination of personal freedom.
Progressivism was allowed to split into those two factions. Roosevelt's social justice was split away from his military interventionism. The social justice faction grew into the neolibs like LBJ and the Feinstein/Schumer/Reid crew, and his "big stick" wound up with William F Buckley and the military/industrial alliance. Both have come home to roost in the same henhouse today as certain pols preach security through loss of personal privacy, feel good laws that offer state favors towards protected groups, and endless war with the rest of the world.
We're letting the media and gov't, as well as the corporations, play a game where everything thinks they are locked into two opposing political 'teams' while they all get away with anything they like.
