"The classical liberals of the 18th, 19th, and much of the 20th century positioned themselves as opponents of what they termed “privilege.” For these thinkers, privilege referred to the monopolies, protections, subsidies, and other benefits that the state made available to particular people but not others equally situated. In the classical liberal tradition, these sorts of privileges violated the central liberal principle of equality before the law. It treated similarly situated people differently. As Hayek notes in The Constitution of Liberty, this use of “privilege” can be understood as deriving from the etymology of the word: the Latin word for laws, “leges,” modified by “privi” for “private.” Privilege was understood to be “private law,” or laws that only applied to some and not others."