On Sun, 6 Aug 2017 19:27:23 -0400 Steve Kinney <admin@pilobilus.net> wrote:
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.
I'm not following. Are you saying that most "healthy adults" are libertarians? If that was the case, then indeed we would expect society to be libertarian. But since the US (in this case) is anything but libertarian, then your premise is false? It seems kinda obvious that most 'healthy' adults are either left wing fascists or right wing fascists. Not healthy at all of course.
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
Looks good. However, the term "capitalism" isn't the right one I think, because it's too ambiguous. More accurate terms : mercantilism or corporatism, which in practice lead to big businesses and monopoly. The authoritarian/anarchist axis is a really good concept. On the other hand, when you look at the four corners you get weird stuff =P - your four corners are : authoritarian capitalism (you marked that "left") authoritarian free enterprise anarchist free enterprise "anarcho capitalism" (right) Authoritarian capitalism is pretty much what rules the world today, and both right wingers and lefties support it to varying degrees. authoritarian free enterprise seems like a contradiction since free enterprise requires the absence of state granted privi-leges. anarchist free enterprise is just free enterprise proper, or a real free market - it's what real libertarians should advocate, etc. and then anarchist capitalism seems contradictory/impossible too, because big businesses need the state to prop them up, grant them privileges, bailouts, subsidies, etc, etc. One could try a variation with two X axis/lines... anarchist<--------------->authoritarian free-market<------------->monopoly Of course, commie anarchists would say that private property is theft, that a free market is hell, and that freedom is slavery.
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:
Indeed. And that's what adam smith and co. called "mercantile system" or mercantilism, mercantilism being exactly the sort of system that actual libertarians should oppose.
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.
I think both the political left and political right are cleary in the authoritarian-capitalist quadrant. Most of the differences between left and right are cosmetic. And it's not possible to defend "capitalism" (the current criminal system) without recourse to the state. It's true that there are people who defend the current fascist system and claim that big businesses are a poor oppressed minority and the government should stop taxing goldman sachs and google and raytheon. I'm referring to the randroid scumbags of course. They certainly beong to the far right, but they have obviously nothing to do with 'anarchism'.
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:
well, the US libertarian party is really a non-entity so their offerings don't really mean anything...
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.
well, that's indeed the philosophy behind "anarchist free enterprise". If on the other hand, you think that a free market will NOT prevent abuse/concentration of economic power, then you'd need to call the state to 'regulate' the market....and stop being an anarchist.
If Fascism is defined as "the merger of Corporate and State power," the Libertarian agenda is not Fascist.
correct.
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.
well, now I'm not sure who you are referring to when you say Libertarians with a capital L. You mean the fake libertarians in the US on the koch payroll? Well yes, those want a plutocratic oligarchy. But they are not really libertarians. They are fake libertarians, like the randroid scumbags I mentioned above. They are conservatives using free market rhetoric. Typical of americans who murder children for fun and profit, in the name of "justice".
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.
Sorry, the red (lower left) quadrant is not free market capitalism at all. The red quadrant is an absurd position IF we use your definition of capitalism. You can't have state privileges(capitalism) if there's no state. Free market capitalism is basically the green quadrant. But you are referring to it as "tribal federations" which is term you just made up... Your red quadrant and your violet quadrant are absurdities and not recognized in 'standard' political philosophy, plus your classification can't account for plain old state socialism/communism.
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?
Are you assuming this is a 'post industrial' world? Or are you talking about some hypothetical collapse of the industrial world? I've bad news for you (and me). The industrial world isn't going away anytime soon. 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)