Lines and Circles and Spheres, Oh My!
A few of you pointed out the problems with a too-simplistic linear left-right chart, and noted other ways to look at the issue. Circles, for example, appeared more than once in that conversation, noting that the Nazi communists and communists would then wind up as adjacent to each other.
I understand the notion, and do consider other approaches as valid and often interesting. The Jerry Pournelle version here (thanks, CatEagle) was intriguing, though not instantly intuitive with regard to rationalism. The communists would likely describe their own approach as the most rational of all, but they are down in the irrational end of the scale.
Despite these other approaches, I’m still fairly happy with a linear measure - but using the “desired big” versus “desired small” government as the index. Interestingly (well, interesting to me at least), the anarchists and minarchists fall on opposite ends of such a system. Minarchist libertarians desire a very small government - typically approximating the US Constitution and Bill of Rights - and anarchists seem to go further yet and want no government at all.
But that really isn’t true of anarchists, I think. Instead, they have historically wanted to overthrow the current system completely - and replace it with communism. Thus, Red Emma Goldberg the famous anrchist was right there with John Reed the communist, making common cause as I wrote about before ( the entry includes a short video clip).
So with anarchists and jihadists and communists and all flavors of socialists all desirous of big government, and Constitutional conservatives/Tea Party/Libertarians desirous of small government, the separation is clean despite the relative simplicity of the linear scale. It is, essentially, the Freedom Index.
So many groups believe that a small government, allowing a high degree of individual freedom, is inherently a bad idea; man is too dangerous. But they would put people from the same species in ultimate control … which has historically produced horrifically bad results.
Make Mine Freedom, as the 1948 animation says!
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle
Originally published at DeHavelle.com. You can comment here or there.