John Carter

That's what the lefties want you to believe.

No, it really isn't multi-dimensional. All of those things you mention are intrinsically linked to each other.

You can't have proper social liberalism if the economy is state dominated, for example - social liberalism ain't just about lezzers getting married, it's also about allowing a bloke to own 40 Ferraris if he wants to (and is able to).

John Carter

Go read Anthem by Ayn Rand then get back to us. It's only 30 pages, so you should be able to crack it by tomorrow. And it's a clear illustration of the left/right line.

http://www.pagebypagebooks.com/Ayn_Rand/Anthem/

Populist Lee

How do you assume I haven't read it already?

I am not *interested* in Constructs.
For an alleged "rightwinger", I repeat, I am gobsmacked that you are happy to walk into the pigeon-hole laid down by Constructionists.

John Carter

I'm not talking about constructs, I'm talking about how things are in the real world.

Populist Lee

Really?
Your posts in the past suggest the opposite.

Why are you assuming, for example, that collectivism and individualism are mutually exclusive?

It's so absurd.

mkpdavies

People like to put things in boxes.

Of late I have come around to JC's argument that you can't be a libertarian left winger. It's just impossible.

It does very much depend on your own personal definitions of left and right though.

For example some people seem to think racist = right wing.
Some people think warmonger = right wing.

Both of them are bonkers in my mind, especially when you look back through history.

I think authoritarian, collective minded (big state) is the ultimate conclusion of the "left wing". You follow the arguments put forward by lefties on things such as climate change, taxation, provision of health-care, education etc and they are all a combination of authoritarian and collective.

What is the closest this planet has truly come to having a libertarian, freedom of the individual based government? I don't think you can ever get there, because near enough all people have a bit of collectivism in them.

As for war, I don't personally understand how you can think of individual freedom, but then act collectively against another collection of people. That is where you have to accept there will always be a degree of collectivism, because if you don't, then some others that do will take advantage of you.

So I think it falls down to this.

Voluntary collectivism or forced. Voluntary is where individuals are trusted to come to a consensus, when the good of the whole truly is at stake. Forces is when you think people on the whole are too dumb, selfish or greedy to be trusted to make a call that is anything but for their own short term personal interests, blinkering them to the long term mess that could lead to.

For me, I believe people on the whole will make the right decisions in the end, so I would prefer people were allowed to make their own decisions. The bad percentage who are 100% selfish, in a society where the hard working keep more of their money and pay less for everything, would be far less than a society where we have more and more of our money taken/stolen, costs are forced up all the time and we are more and more restricted in what we can do.

Most will say there is a happy balance somewhere in between. I say that happy balance is nearer the individual freedom side (which is the right wing box for many). The thing I believe that will keep it balanced the most, is the act of "collective" democracy in that scenario, but on a much more direct level. IE even there, the collective nature is tempered by individual controls.

Or you can just accept you are a sheep or a wolf.

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Dissident Congress

In some people's minds, yes. In engineering political strategy, not always.

No it isn't. I was working on the concept of freedom, or different types of freedoms a few years ago when investigating the Freedom Party and what it stood for. In general there are:

1. Personal freedom - this is freedom of the individual when it does not technically impact upon society or the nation as a whole. It includes things like recreational use of drugs, the right to abortion on demand, and same sex marriage.

2. Financial freedom - this is freedom to do whatever one likes with their money and assets regardless of its consequences for society or the nation as a whole.

3. Political freedom - this is the right to free speech, opposition of political correctness, the ability for anybody to form their own political movements and contest elections without persecution from opponents, freedom of public information, and possibly direct democracy.

4. National freedom - this the right for individual nation states to manage their own internal affairs without interference from foreign or international organisations.

Technically these four freedoms are independent or only loosely connected together. For example, the Freedom Party emphasises points 3 and 4. The Green Party emphasises point 1, opposes point 2, and provides some support for points 3 and 4.

Smidgey

Not always, are you not forgetting Pinochet? He was a perfect example of an authoritarian free market capitalist.

I prefer to accept Milton Friedman's definition that there are three types of liberty: political, economic and civil.

Economic liberty affects political liberty, but political liberty rarely affects economic liberty. Civil liberty, however, is a totally different ball game.

I don't like lumping people into categories like this, and if we are going to talk about the left-right distinction then we are going to get bogged down.

As a libertarian I often talk to socialists who think I'm crazy to be in favour of the free-market and then I go and talk to conservatives who think I'm crazy to want to legalise drugs, prostitution and euthanasia.

If we are going to have any distinction at all, I prefer the political compass as opposed to the binary left-right distinction. This way we can implement those who are economic left/right and socially libertarian/authoritarian. Which is why in a binary left-right distinction I would be central, whilst in the political compass distinction I am extreme right economically and extreme libertarian socially.

In my view the left-right distinction is just far too arbitrary and does not factor in enough. It can also be misleading.

Britannist

You've been reading the Guardian again, it seems.

The Late General Pinochet was a patriot who replaced a pro-Soviet authoritarian communist regime in Chile with a Government which many now consider to have allowed more freedoms than do some so-called democratic nations today.

The Government of General Pinochet did not, for instance have one CCTV camera for every 15 people as we do here in the Blair/Labour police state. Neither did the General force everyone to spend the good part of a hundred Pounds on an unwanted ID card (with the threat of prison to anyone who doesn't inform the ID database when they move address).

Smidgey

That is completely irrelevant Britannist. Whether or not he is better than the previous communists or better than some democratic nations does not remove from the fact that he was authoritarian.

P.S. being a patriot means nothing. Stalin and Hitler were patriots as well, to jump to the extreme end of things.