Oh, honestly. Instead of reading that moron and liar Jonah Goldberg, why don’t you read a book like The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by someone who did actual research.
The Nazis were crony capitalists and corporatists. During their rise to power, they were primarily funded by wealthy industrialists, and in order to keep that funding going, they purged the socialists from their ranks. As soon as they came into power, they quickly crushed the existing Socialist and Communist parties.
http://www.nolanchart.com/survey.php
Now that is one intensely annoying little quiz. Take question one–what if I’m a free speech absolutist, but think eminent domain and some other infringements on private property rights are reasonable exercises of state power? What if I agree that assembly can be restricted in order to protect against threats to public safety, but consider it essential to maintain free speech and a free press (including speech over the Internet)? What if “It is also vital that the State not become a tool to impose religious beliefs in schools or other public settings and that limited use of eminent domain is acceptable for public projects like roads and schools, but inappropriate for private projects like shopping malls or condominiums” is a perfectly peachy expression of my views, but I think “criminalizing hate speech” is wrong, wrong, wrong?
Now of course in the real world, when I go into the voting booth the vast majority of the time I have to choose between Democrats and Republicans–if a voter wants to support environmental protections, she may also have to support gun control; if a voter wants to protect the rights of the unborn, he may also have to support a hawkish foreign policy. But for one of these little Internet quizzes, I see no reason not to break the thing down into 20 or 30 questions and disambiguate this stuff.
By gritting my teeth and choosing the least bad paragraph for each question, I came out where I always come out–liberal, fairly close to the corner of libertarian and centrist–but in an exercise like this, presumably the whole point is to break free of conventional Left-Right, two-party thinking and find new possible ways of looking at the world (Pro-lifers for gun control! Environmentalists for the War in Iraq!)
“The government has grown” ain’t nothin’ to bitch about, it’s simply an incident of modernization. Look around the world: The countries where things in general go best all have bloated states. The countries where things go worst sometimes have bloated states (North Korea) or sometimes the pitiful reverse (Somalia).
Next thing you’ll be telling me the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea isn’t a democracy.
I think it’s actually a fractal manifold: complex, convoluted, but ultimately, the same shit on every scale…
I’m not saying this to be rude or uncivil, but someone prefaces their statements by slapping the labels of “moron and liar” on someone with whom they disagree, I tend to disregard, or at least regard with great skepticism, anything else they might say. Other than that, thanks for the information.
I’m not going to get into a big debate about it, but I don’t think that saying that the Nazis weren’t socialist is no more true than saying that they were paragons of pure socialism. Again, it comes down to objectivity and, probably, what specific time period you’re looking at when determining the gradation.
I am not sure of the exact numbers but I believe that the last I heard the Libertarians were pretty consistently offering candidates in about 3/4 of federal races and about 95% of all statewide races, so there usually is an alternative to left and right available to most voters. Other parties are fielding candidates frequently too, but not as many I do not think as the Libertarians.
You are quite correct that the quiz could be more accurate if it had more questions. The problem here is it is largely used at places like a booth at the county fair as an introduction to the idea that politics is not linear. If the quiz added a bunch more questions, many of the public would be daunted from taking the quiz in the first place. it would be much more difficult to get a lot of people to take a 30 question quiz than a 10 question quiz.
Perhaps coming up with a long version of the quiz to offer online to those with a great deal of interest is a good idea.
I suppose that depends on your opinion of what is best. Myself I think it best for America to stop being the world’s policemen and see nothin truly important about being a world leader. I’d prefer simpler lives and far more localized economies in many areas, especially food.
I wasn’t even talking about countries’ military establishments. A big government is simply something you need, internally, to properly run an industrialized modern society.
As for localizing economies, fine, so long as we can get there gradually without massive disruption – as opposed to being forced into it by declining petroleum supplies, which might yet happen. But we’d still need biggummint no less than now – I hope you’re not talking about autarchic local economies, which would be bad craziness.
Accurate? No of course not and accuracy is not the issue. “Is it the most useful for practical discussions?” The concept is to simplify for the sake of discussions. (Think of the Steven Wright joke: “I have a map of the United States… Actual size. It says, ‘Scale: 1 mile = 1 mile.’ I spent last summer folding it. I hardly ever unroll it. People ask me where I live, and I say, 'E6.”)
All of the models discussed in this thread are attempts to reduce the actual diversity of political thought into a simplified map. You want it as simple as possible without losing that which is essential; too accurate and you never bother to unroll it.
How many and which axes are needed depends therefore on the context of the particular discussion. Is a simple linear right/left model too simple to be useful for practical discussions? Are two dimensional or greater maps of political diversity too complex to be useful in most common circumstances?
definitely no more than three axes. I think our ability to plot it out geometrically is important if we are going to avoid serious confusion. Since we are used to a three dimensional reality, modeling with three dimensions may be best.
Let me expand the scope of the thread to include “what model would be best?”
Now I will assume for the sake of argument that a three dimensional model is best because it allows the maximum number of vectors without introducing serious confusion. If we take that as given, my question now is, what should the third vector be in a three dimensional model, or better said, what third axis would be best for a goal of fairly representing all the myriad views out there?
In my opinion: Classification based on foreign policy stance, isolationism vs. interventionism. This is a major area of politics but it doesn’t match closely with the standard two areas of economic policy stance and social policy stance.
Every serious historian on the Nazis disagrees with him because he has no idea what he’s talking about. I’ve pointed you to a reputable work, which although long, is a fairly easy read, and explains the Nazi economy in detail. Anyone who says they were socialists either is deliberately lying or doesn’t understand what the term socialism means when it comes to economics.
Simply throwing around the term “objectivity” doesn’t mean you’ve actually posted any thing correct here. If you want to call the Nazi party socialist before Hitler took control of it, then go ahead, but before Hitler, the party had zero impact on German politics. Once Hitler takes control of the party, the socialists are purged, so that by the time they actually get to holding political power and can implement an agenda, they are no longer socialists. There is no gradation here, and you are being completely unobjective by trying to claim that the Nazis were socialists.
And I suspect you don’t know what economic policies the Nazis actually implemented, which is why you don’t want to “get into a big debate” about it.
Bright and shiny, while I tend to agree with your view rather than Penderel here, I think it’s time to point out this has gotten far afield.
Let’s stick to the accuracy of any particular political model, rather than what any particular group was, please?
Fair enough.
Ok, so I’ll chime in on this left-right thing as it applies to economics. I would divide government intervention in the market into roughly the following categories:
Now, many interventions fall into multiple categories. I’m also not particularly attached to these characterizations. But let’s take #4. A classic example of market efficiency regulation is pollution regulation.
So, you dump a bunch of noxious chemicals on your property. The chemicals seep into my property and destroy its value. How exactly do we classify the regulation or lack of regulation as being more free or less free? Without a regulation that says you can’t dump chemicals on your property, I suffer damage. So, I’m less free. With the regulation, you don’t get to use your property as you like, so you’re less free.
I think most of us would say that the regulation is only fair and should be put into place. But where does that put us on the scale?
Or let’s take #3, Social/Moral Regulation. A lot of these regulations may have moral or religious or whatever foundation, but they are economic regulations as well. Blue laws are a perfect example of this. Prostitution bans are another example (side note, you can justify prostitution bans on market efficiency issues, but even if you remove those issues, people are still against it). So, if we look at the Nolan chart, many libertarians are against blue laws and prostitution bans. But I would not characterize the right wing as being against these things. So, why does being right wing point to more economic freedom?
The last one on my list, Collectivism, has never been a major factor in the US, but I’ve included it for completeness.
Most Libertarians, if i may hazard a guess based on experience, would favor any regulation that protects the right of a property owner in a significant way. Your rights end where mine begin, or vice versa. But as you point out, not all issues fit neatly into one category. In this case your example is one of those hard to deal with issues. Almost any use of property has some kind of impact on the neighbors. Because this is such a hard one, its probably the reason it hasn’t ever appeared as one of the quiz questions.
The “big tent” problem has been pointed out–that it is impossible to acheive the total platform because it is inconsistent, i.e., the small government the republicans say they want cannot enforce morals. As I said, many issues cross categories. But these two compete with one another. It is hard to measure, but not because of a defect of the nolan chart, the defect belongs to parties who allow a “big tent” problem of differing factions with competeing ideas rather than complementary ideas. The republicrats are schizo as a group.
As you can see, a person who scores high in economic issues and low in social issues will be plotted as conservative.
Every government is a direct market participant; not every one owns or operates productive property or enterprises, unless we define such broadly enough to include the military, police, etc.
Yeah I see the problem with abrupt changes. The libertarian paltform would be idiotic to implement over 1 year, even though I think we are doomed if we do not implement it over the next 20-30 years.
I can’t comment on autarchic local economies–there are multiple definitions, not all necessarily compatible–and autarchic is a word describing a government, not an economy, unless you’d care to clarify what you would mean.
Some areas of the government would have to remain large for a large nation, there is no getting past that. A robust military is important. Plenty of cops, plenty of courts–but all this alphabet soup of government agencies with competing missions and overlapping jurisdictions seem ridiculous. That is nothing but waste. I’d keep one federal police force with rather than having the FBI DEA and BTF. Let one cop shop handle it all.
As for all the regulating, I’d prefer the market sort it out with an eye to the lawsuits when businessmen do something dishonest and unethical.