Arkady of Right Condition has a new “political spectrum” up:
This strikes me as a libertarian-centric spectrum. That’s fine as it goes, all “spectrums” or “typologies” are selective in what parameters they use to generate categories. The main issue with a libertarian-centric one I would have is that so few people are libertarian.
I think it’s still inferior to the simple but ubiquitous 2-axis Nolan Chart. It’s fine if you want to ignore secularity or the social aspect.
Also, how about some more policy examples on the ‘left’ including deregulation, whatever.
The very fact that the libertarian side is assigned to the left tells me that whoever came up with the chart is a left-libertarian. If I (a right-libertarian) were making the chart, I would have reversed the axis, put, Friedman, Reagan and Bush Jr. farther to the right, and put Carter and the DNC farther to the left.
Hey, I’m against the smoking bans too, but it isn’t nearly as bad as government health care.
Libertarianism always looks good on such charts.
Making these in two dimensions is tough. There are a lot of issues that just don’t fit nicely, not the least of which is whether those issues are even a part of the platform. It might actually work better as a pie slice with Libertarianism at the pointy end, since they have very few issues that they think even need addressing, while the socialist side of the spectrum feels the need to legislate everything they can think of.
Totalitarianism can occur on the right too (or left in this example).
The very fact that the libertarian side is assigned to the left tells me that whoever came up with the chart is a left-libertarian
then why are von mises & hayek exemplars? in any case, i happen to know that arkady considers himself on the “right,” so it would be strange if he was a left-libertarian by self-identification, though perhaps by your typology he might be.
Strange that Mao is considered less totalitarian than Hitler.
shouldn’t the left axis be anarchy-libertarianism-conservativism-theocracy?
fjkl,
I had the same thought. I figure he’d be on par with both Hitler and Stalin.
John,
Yeah, putting smoking bans on a par with censorship strikes me as rather stupid, and I say this as someone who tends to oppose them.
It’s puerile. Smoking bans are just slightly less totalitarian than Stalin and Hitler? Even the libertarian parts are facile and arbitrary; how was Hayek more of a governmental minimalist than Mises?
This does not appear to be about left or right, rather that there is no left or right. I also dont think that policies should be compared to the people, as the website states the examples are more or less arbitrary and used to clarify the major point.
Nice to see a discussion over this, even if it’s a bit critical. Allow me to clarify a few points here, if I may. I did update the chart to reflect left/right – at least in how I think it plays into today’s politics.
Regarding Mao/Stalin/Hitler and Mises/Hayek, paying attention to a somewhat arbitrary assignment was not the point. I contemplated showing no examples what so ever, but feared the layman would fail to grasp the idea. Throwing in a few examples here and there drives the point home. That being said, there are subtle differenecs between the men, especially in Mao’s case allowing Deng to wrestle control and having no outright gulag/concentration camps that makes him slightly less authoritative. Ultimtely, does it really matter?
The ultimate idea was to illustrate that in modern American politics most of the ideas/people congregrate around the pink area with some notable exceptions. This is to further drive the point home, that embracing more government control could lead to socialism or worse. This also serves to break down the silly notion that conservatism somehow leads to nazism if one goes “enough to the right”. This is nonsense and old political spectrums do not do enough to dissuade people of this fallacy.
I place no stress or focus on libertarianism, not at all. In fact it is quite barren for a reason, but it certainly is in my mind an ideological opposite of authoritative regimes, with anarchism being the impractical opposite.
Lastly, with my updated chart and I do make a mention of this on site, the idea that there has to be a left and a right is probably a relic, a product of 20th century politics. We do not need this characteristic, as it serves to confuse people.
Ahh, one other matter regarding smoking bans – apparently a sore spot. Consider the war on drugs, an oppressive and arguably ineffective war – but at least war rooted in society preservation. After all, drugs were quite destructive not just to the individual, but to the society as a whole.
Smoking takes on a much more serious invasion of one’s freedom. An act that primarily causes harm to oneself, in a much less destructive an obvious manner. Even if you were to consider second hand smoking, one certainly has the mobility and choice to exit the premise. An invasion of freedom over such triviliaties as smoking combined with enforcing businesses to adhere to state policies seems awfully oppressive.
The thing that strikes me most about the chart is that the farther you go in the Libertarian direction, the less you find about facts in the ordinary world. Over there it is all philosophical principles and no grub. I think it was Berholt Brecht who remarked, “Grub first, then ethics.”
As a liberal, my chronic critique of conservatives is precisely their disconnection from fact. Every policy you see in the chart is a response to fact, either a reactive response, or a proactive response. And there pretty much are no policies in the blue and grey areas.
The difference between a centrist conservative like Ronald Reagan and a centrist liberal like Bill Clinton, hinges precisely on the issue of how much the response of government should be proactive rather than reactive. The difference between both of them and Milton Friedman is the belief that problems solve themselves without anybody doing any more than just hanging out.
And the difference between both Reagan and Clinton and more extreme individuals in the pink and red areas is that government should arbitrarily create new facts by policy rather than respond to facts with policy.
@Joseph Marshall
Libertarians present few realities because private/free market solutions are solved without people knowing them. Large government politicians insist that every problem is a crisis and must be solved by government intervention. At some point somewhere somehow people decided that drinking was bad and government had to step in. Failed experiment. Same with drugs, too bad the failure of that prohibition has not kicked in. Education, health care, terrorism, “dangerous drugs”, smoking in bars and even people’s retirement were all responses to a “crisis” that had to be addressed. We can discuss the merits of these interventions and problem solving approaches until the cows come home, but we cannot ignore the ever expanding role of government. We cannot ignore that expansion of said government impinges and restricts in ways we cannot imagine.
You can justify war on drugs or social security or medicare. But I can’t. The damage caused by federal intrusion is often far greater than the problem it set out to solve.
If you want to see what I criticize in action consider the issues of “war on drugs” and “smoking bans”.
Here is the first fact: nicotine may very well be the single most addictive substance on earth. Ex-heroin addicts frequently tell you that it is harder to give up cigarettes for them than to beat heroin. There is nothing in addictive drug abuse per se that is inherently “destructive to society”.
Here is the second fact: the evidence is perfectly plain that smoking has deleterious health effects on bystanders as well as users. The effects are not as widespread, but they are equally real. Take a cross-country bus trip sometime, if you really want to see the degree that second hand smoke has a physiological impact on non-smokers.
Here is the third fact: Except for the addiction itself, the opiates have far less negative impact on general health than almost all other drugs of abuse, including nicotine and alcohol. The “health issues” of any drug are far more complicated and fluid than the rhetoric on any side of the issue admits.
Here is the fourth fact: The single most dangerous drug of abuse in terms of an acute and lethal overdose is alcohol. The common and customary amounts consumed, particularly of distilled liquor, are far closer to the lethal levels of dosage than other drugs of abuse. Alcohol also has superadditive effects when combined with other Rx drugs that impact the central nervous system, frequently resulting in overdose death.
Put these four facts together and the way we respond to the drugs of abuse problem is completely irrational and senseless. And the overheated rhetoric about all of this–which is predominently but not wholly, conservative–creates a chronic atmosphere of fact-abusive hysteria.
Nicotine is a “public health problem”, Alcohol abuse is generally treated as a conduct and behavior problem. Opiates, stimulants, and hallucinogens are “dangerous drugs of abuse” and “destructive to society”.
All of the societal difficulties we have with drugs of abuse are due to the wild distortions of the market for addictive drugs rather than the drugs themselves. Drugs of abuse are, inherently, a seller’s market. Most of the ways in which we respond to that are soceitaly counterproductive in one way or another –heavily taxing tobacco and alcohol to get in on the gravy train, controlling the distribution of alcohol but not the packaged quantities of distilled liquor, allowing the tobacco companies pretty much free rein to manipulate the product chemically to increase its appetitiveness and it’s addictiveness, and giving the rest of the trade over to thugs, killers, and racketeers who make chronic outrageous windfall profits from the outlawry involved.
This sum total of policies is largely driven by a social conservative disconnection from the four facts above, and is far more detrimental overall to society as a whole than the actual market for and usage of drugs of abuse themselves.
Joseph,
You get into some pretty counterfactual territory on the right side of the chart, too. Having the government proactively create facts can often create a lot of trouble, too.
Arkady,
I can see the value in what you’re doing. It’s more of a statist/anarchist spectrum. There’s some value in that. The “left/right” divide can get pretty foggy. You often have people accusing classical liberals of being “fascist” because they happen to fall on the right side of the divide at this point in history.
The problem I have with your assignment of the smoking ban is that it really doesn’t belong to the right of things like eugenics or even universal healthcare. Even if we’re assuming a total ban on tobacco products, that’s not nearly as invasive as telling people what they can say or read, IMO. It’s certainly not as invasive as determining which people can procreate. I mean, c’mon. Really?
You get into some pretty counterfactual territory on the right side of the chart, too. Having the government proactively create facts can often create a lot of trouble, too.
Of course. That’s why there is such a thing as a “center” between extremes. But even in the center, clear knowledge and appreciation of the facts should come before application of principles and not after. The “war on drugs” and public smoking bans are not solutions at the extremes of political life, but they are largely attempts to apply principles without first acquiring and appreciating the facts.
We can discuss the merits of these interventions and problem solving approaches until the cows come home, but we cannot ignore the ever expanding role of government. We cannot ignore that expansion of said government impinges and restricts in ways we cannot imagine.
Of course attempts at “reform” can backfire spectacularly. Prohibition was one, Jim Crow was another. There are no guarantees in this world. But go read up on the 1918 influenza epidemic and then tell me that we should get rid of the Federal Center For Disease Control! That little episode occurred during what I call the Conservative Garden of Eden–American life between about 1870 and 1940. Take a little time to read about everything that was happening in the interval and then make a case for it being a better life than we currently have.
The Libertarian Ideal is largely the product of the unique social and economic conditions of the United States between about 1803 and 1861, particularly the possibility for every individual to independently own a freehold of land to make a free livelihood. Those conditions are gone forever. Period.
But even during the period of the greatest American freedom there was much more intervention of government into the process than Libertarians are willing to face. The way the United States government parcelled out the land encouraged far more land speculation then freehold agriculture. The canals and railroads would have been impossible without government subsidy of direct cash or in grants of land far in excess of the need for right-of-way, which the owners sold then for as much more profit than accrued from the railroads themselves. Finally, the presence of the military, it’s efforts against the natives, and it’s actual survey and documentation of the land itself, in all areas of settlement was both a direct government economic subsidy to all and far more lucrative to speculators in military food contracts than to any freehold farm.
Government economic and social intervention has never been absent from our lives despite the historical illusion that this was so in our past, and, therefore, possible to recreate.
@Polichinello
I urge people to consider the examples with a grain of salt, they are not meant to drive the point home and if all that is being discussed are the examples, then perhaps I have failed.
There is no anarchist/libertarian methodology here, there is simply a clear division between who our friends are.
Smoking bans are an outright infraction of governmetn control, while eugenics is often a subversive consequence of health policies that could be implicitly exercised by certain officials. In the former, they do not hide their contempt for what they feel is “bad for you” because they have a ton of liberal support. My ultimate point is that smoking bans are a slippery slope and government control in personal choice that far exceeds its original charter.
@Joseph Marshall
Joseph, I am not an anarchist, nor am I a pure libertarian as my website’s position on the spectrum suggests. I am merely pointing the implementation of regulations, agencies and control inevitably leads to expansion of government and that in turn may or may not lead to harsher scarier manifestations.
Ok, the flu pandemic wiped out a lot of people and can easily be used as a pretext for maintaining a well funded federal disease agency. Unfortunately we then lose the control in determining whether this agency is properly funded, never makes mistakes, oversteps it’s boundry, hurts in other ways, etc. The best example is the FDA, an agency constantly credited with saving lives by preventing bad substances from entering the market and saving X lives. However it has become quite clear that it not only costs us billions of dollars, but kills XXXX lives by blocking life saving medicines.
Go ahead and try to prove to the average American that we must get rid of the FDA – not a chance. Why? Dependency and an inability to reason from an individual standpoint and a reliance on a benevolent agency has rendered many Americans useless. We are headed to an either total nanny state a la Brave New World/Europe or worse.
Well, this political spectrum definitely has the recent U.S. presidents positioned correctly.
@Arkady
I agree with this 100%. I will also add the fact that the FDA refuses to consider the aging process itself as a treatable medical condition, thus preventing approval of possible effective anti-aging medical therapies. The current way to get around this roadblock is to say that any anti-aging therapy is a treatment for sarcopenia (loss of muscle mass), which I believe is a medical condition that is recognized by the FDA.
It is well-known in the life extension community that government agencies such as the FDA have been generally hostile to efforts in developing effective anti-aging medicine.
However it has become quite clear that it not only costs us billions of dollars, but kills XXXX lives by blocking life saving medicines.
Well, it may have become clear to you, but it’s certainly not clear to me. How many medications are you on at the moment? I am on a number of medications myself. First, there is one in particular that is very touchy. You must go on it or off it in 25 ml stages until you reach or leave the maximum dosage of 300 ml twice a day. One of the side effects of too much too fast building up is death. The other of the side effects of too little too fast coming down is artificially induced seizures.
Then there is another one I take which has several different forms of dosage with different strengths and lengths of extended release. The effects of these vary markedly and each individual has to find the right combination for optimum effect. I have had occasion to be forced to shift from one of these to another in an emergency and the change is usually devastating–not as bad, of course, as going off cold turkey–but massively unpleasant nonetheless.
Further, certain conditions like high colesterol and high blood pressure do not show overt symptoms of sickness. The only way you can tell if they are being medicated properly is through blood work or blood pressure checks. Blood work is expensive and drug store blood pressure machines are not always available, or that reliable, so for most of us it is not possible to check these conditions more frequently than monthly. So you have to rely solely on the dosage levels being exact and the compounds being pure.
Finally, certain conditions, like thyroid trouble, require dosage adjustment that can vary as little as 2-5 mcg. Again, purity and consistency are essential.
So I really don’t want the FDA to stop monitoring the consistency and quality of my medications, thank you. Now this does not mean that their judgment is perfect when approving new medications, but, in fact, it’s pretty darn good when it is riding herd on the old ones. And most of us who happen to be on medications find that very comforting.
The fact that so many on the conservative side of the house can be so cavalier about dangers to public health is one of the main reasons my opposition to them is as strong as it is. I have been in genuine danger several times from communicable disease, and I can tell you straight from the shoulder that you do not know what a genuine cocoon of safety from sickness and death by illness you live in–which is there simply and solely because the government is active in preserving the health of all of us.
I also remember things like polio, tuberculosis, and smallpox as having a real impact on people I knew and met. Not many of them, but they were still there. How many times have you met someone who went through the ravages of these diseases? They have virtually disappeared in this country. And it didn’t happen through free market forces, I can assure you. It took coordinated public effort, though government to wipe them out, and it is one of the reasons that our life expectancy increased steadily throughout the entire 20th Century.
These are facts. I sometimes think that conservatives regard facts as optional to life. Perhaps they are. But, if so, it is only because of the government created cocoon of safety that I mentioned earlier.
“So I really don’t want the FDA to stop monitoring the consistency and quality of my medications, thank you.”
Easy solution: Allow Arkady to opt out of FDA regulations for his own personal use. You don’t have to.
If he wants, sure, as long as it doesn’t impact my health. That is my point about “drugs of abuse” above. But who would want to do this when they are chronically ill? Would you?
@Joseph
I hear you loud and clear on the cocoon but the question that we cannot answer is whether competitive, free-market agencies would not have arisen in the absence of the FDA or CDC? These are clearly useful services why would someone not have began doing this? The libertarian idea is that these services, if genuinely valuable would have begun to be offered, at first to wealthier clients, it’s true, but through market competetion would have become less and less expensive and available to a broader market – like TV.
Also, the expansion of charities in the Victorian period was a model for voluntary assistance to the poor which was gradually supplanted by the growth of state welfare in the 20th C. There are other ways of doing things but the state crowds them out and reduces the possibility of beneficial experimentation and innovation.
JGP
@JGP: Consumer Reports already exists, but it can’t *stop* people from selling unsafe products, only give warnings that may be unheard or drowned out by advertising. It’s not really an adequate substitute for the FDA because the ability to coerce a seller of unsafe goods to stop is indispensable. The libertarian idea is that anyone who is fooled by Ford into believing that that rumor about the Pinto is just an urban legend deserves to be burned alive in a crash for their gullibility.
This isn’t just speculation, either — the FDA wasn’t always around, which is where we get terms like “snake oil”. Free market alternatives had centuries to arise on their own and didn’t, or were insufficiently effective compared to advertising by the snake-oil salesmen.
The libertarian idea is that anyone who is fooled by Ford into believing that that rumor about the Pinto is just an urban legend deserves to be burned alive in a crash for their gullibility.
We libertarians would not say that he “deserves” to die. We just think that the government has no right to stop a person from saying, “I know the Pinto is dangerous, but I like it anyway and am willing to assume the risk.”