Many political debates here have included references to The Political Compass, which uses a set of 61 questions to assess one’s political orientation in terms of economic left/right and social libertarianism/authoritarianism (rather like the “Libertarian diamond” popular in the US).
And so, every so often I will begin a thread in which the premise for debate is one of the 61 questions. I will give which answer I chose and provide my justification and reasoning. Others are, of course, invited to do the same including those who wish to “question the question”, as it were. I will also suggest what I think is the “weighting” given to the various answers in terms of calculating the final orientation.
It would also be useful when posting in these threads to give your own “compass reading” in your first post, by convention giving the Economic value first. My own is
SentientMeat: Economic: -5.12, Social: -7.28, and so by the above convention my co-ordinates are (-5.12, -7.28). Please also indicate which option you ticked.
Now, I appreciate that there is often dissent regarding whether the assessment the test provides is valid, notably by US conservative posters, either because it is “left-biased” (??) or because some propositions are clearly slanted, ambiguous or self-contradictory. The site itself provides answers to these and other Frequently Asked Questions, and there is also a separate thread: Does The Political Compass give an accurate reading? Read these first and then, if you have an objection to the test in general, please post it there. If your objection is solely to the proposition in hand, post here. If your objection is to other propositions, please wait until I open a thread on them.
The above will be pasted in every new thread in order to introduce it properly, and I’ll try to let each one exhaust itself of useful input before starting the next. Without wanting to “hog the idea”, I would be grateful if others could refrain from starting similar threads. To date, the threads are:
Does The Political Compass give an accurate reading?
Political Compass #1: Globalisation, Humanity and OmniCorp.
#2: My country, right or wrong
#3: Pride in one’s country is foolish.
#4: Superior racial qualities.
#5: My enemy’s enemy is my friend.
#6: Justifying illegal military action.
#7: “Info-tainment” is a worrying trend.
#8: Class division vs. international division. (+ SentientMeat’s economic worldview)
#9: Inflation vs. unemployment.
#10: Corporate respect of the environment.
#11: From each according to his ability, to each according to need.
#12: Sad reflections in branded drinking water.
#13: Land should not be bought and sold.
*Proposition #14: * Many personal fortunes are made by people who simply manipulate money and contribute nothing to their society.
SentientMeat (-5.12, -7.28) ticks Agree.
For each such person given as an example, there are arguments that the creation of their personal fortune did somehow benefit their society, which is perhaps why I did not go so far as Strongly Agreeing. The stock market trader is facilitating investment in “useful” businesses and restricting it in “unappealing” ones, thus allowing the fittest to survive and grow in the Darwinian fire of commerce from whose ashes rises the phoenix of progress. The currency speculator effectively does the same with entire countries , again sloshing the money around the world with highly desirable fluidity. The property investor is encouraging useful building and improvement work. The accountant whose fortune is based on squirrelling his clients’ assets away from taxmen the world over is contributing to the financial well-being of, say, Belize or the Cayman Islands. Even the professional gambler provides the world with the spectacle of a high-stakes poker game, and is the buying of a single lottery ticket not a crude attempt to accrue a personal fortune based on “manipulating money”? Even then, that activity may be said to contribute overall, especially if a portion of the ticket price goes to charitable causes.
But of course, as with all games which are either zero-sum or small in their positive sum, the Game of Life necessitates losers as well as winners. If the trader is a winner, the losers are the poor hard-working sods who lose their livelihoods due to the poor judgment of their management. The same goes for winning speculators like George Soros, who helped put countless British losers out of work by betting heavily against the pound and causing the panicked government to push interest rates through the roof. The property investor may be making it too expensive for teachers and nurses to live in a particular area, to society’s detriment, or may be insensitive to cultural or environmental heritage. And in the case of the accountant, wealth has a curious way of sticking to the wealthy - I strongly doubt that the good which the money might have done to society had the accountant not been so clever in keeping it from the taxman would be in any way rivalled by it merely sitting in offshore bank, even allowing for the fact that the bank itself can release the funds for socially useful (or perhaps harmful) activity. (And if the bank is in another country it is hardly benefitting their society as such.)
Personal fortunes based on “money manipulation” are the way of the world; I can clearly see that such activity is the very heart upon which the market depends to pump money around the system. But at the same time I find the idea of “trickle down” illusory, since the wealthy appear to be able to keep their wealth from society quite easily. I feel intuitively (objective measurement being nigh impossible) that the actual contribution made to society by many money-manipulation fortunes, after accounting for the losses to society they entailed, would vary quite markedly. Many of them, I venture, would come out pretty much zero.
