On 08/06/2017 12:52 PM, jim bell wrote:
Leftist = rightist = centrist = financialist.
Using these obsolete terms does nothing but stultify the conversation. Let's try to find a more expressive and useful vocabulary for political discussion.
Particularly since the Nolan Chart, combined with the World's Smallest Political Quiz, is so much more informative:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nolan_Chart
"Frustrated by the "left-right" line analysis that leaves no room for other ideologies, Nolan devised a chart with two axes which would come to be known as the Nolan Chart. The Nolan Chart is the centerpiece of the World's Smallest Political Quiz
The Nolan Chart, beloved recruiting tool of the Libertarian Party, works reliably as such because - along with the associated diagnostic instrument - it measures and graphs the desire of the individual for ego gratification and freedom of action. Anyone who passes the Nolan test by landing in the "Libertarian" quadrant - a foregone conclusion for most healthy adults - should proceed from this introspective analysis to consideration of which political / economic system would offer the best shot at implementing their lifestyle choices as "rugged individualists." The Nolan instrument provides no help, as its diagnostic output indicates personal preferences among a set of stereotyped partisan sales pitches - not the net impact of competing public policy agendas on individual "freedom." The Nolan test indicates what people believe about themselves, not the actual motives that affect their actions - otherwise, the inevitable conversion of our society to a Libertarian model of governance would have happened decades ago. To represent something more like the real world, I propose a somewhat different graph to represent a two dimensional array of political / economic organizational principles: The vertical axis represents State power mediated by applied violence as an Authoritarian / Anarchist scale; the horizontal axis represents Private power mediated by applied economic force on a Capitalism / Free Enterprise scale. The upper left corner represents total concentration of power in the fewest hands, the lower right corner represents uniform distribution of power across an entire population. Kinney Chart http://pilobilus.net/Political-Power-Spectrum.png The Capitalism / Free Enterprise axis raises immediate objections from many observers, due to the indoctrinated belief that Capitalism /is/ Free Enterprise. In my observation and experience, corporate capitalism makes itself the natural enemy of free enterprise: Powerful corporations enforce their market dominance by any means necessary, from sponsoring legislation and controlling regulatory policy to suppress independent competitors, to dumping look-alike products on the market until smaller enterprises are bankrupted. This behavior may be "illegal" but in litigation as elsewhere, money is power and the real golden rule says: A player who shows up with orders of magnitude more gold than the other player wins. A buy-out removing the independent small business from the market by mutual agreement is the best case scenario for an independent enterprise in conflict with a well funded corporate adversary. I have placed the political Left and Right on the chart, to indicate their functional features in the chart's context: The actual players whose followers call themselves Liberals and Conservatives all seek to conserve and advance the concentration of financial power in the hands of an elite minority (corporate capitalists), differing only on whether that economic power should be consolidated and exercised indirectly through State institutions or directly through Private cartels. If most people who identify as Libertarian would rather live in the lower right quadrant of the above graph, so sorry. That Party offers no such program or agenda: Only a hollow promise that incorruptible Civil Courts will deliver equal justice to penniless individuals and corporate cartels, and that the infallible invisible hand of the Free Market will prevent systemic abuse of corporate power. If Fascism is defined as "the merger of Corporate and State power," the Libertarian agenda is not Fascist. In practical terms, the Libertarian agenda could be described as an effort to achieve full replacement of State power by Corporate power. One might call the result a Plutocratic Oligarchy. That is why I call my own orientation and agenda Anarchism. My preferred quadrant of the above graph is the lower right one: Broadly distributed political and economic power among autonomous local communities. Clockwise from lower left, I associate the quadrants with Free Market Capitalism, Socialist State Capitalism, Feudal Aristocracy and Tribal Federations. All loosely defined, as is proper with high level abstract labels. All have their upsides and downsides, but Tribal Federations have, so far, produced the least harmful results overall. Can that model make a comeback in the post-industrial world? I think so, but that outcome depends entirely on economic drivers: Will the global industrial economy crash, and if so, can it recover in its present form? I think the crash will happen, and recovery to "the old normal" will not. What the hell, it's something to play with. :o)