Politics

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Fall_Child42
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Re: Politics

Post by Fall_Child42 » Sun Sep 02, 2012 10:26 am

I have a question about this political compass.

How does this bottom left corner even make any sense?

How can somebody be against government involvement but pro social programs?

A strong government influence is needed in order to have social programs at all. Somebody with libertarian ideals should not be willing to accept anything like healthcare, having roads built for them, or free education. So in order to be left economically you would have to lean at least somewhat authoritarian.
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Otohiko
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Re: Politics

Post by Otohiko » Sun Sep 02, 2012 10:32 am

Fall_Child42 wrote: How can somebody be against government involvement but pro social programs?
What does the bottom left corner have to do with social programs?

To simplify and extremize, bottom left corner is hippie utopia where no government or authority exists at all, but everybody lives in agreement with each other while respecting everybody else's uniqueness.

(Of course, consider the other 3 corners too, top left being a permanent "dictatorship of the proletariat", top right being cyberpunk-esque corporate hell, bottom right being some sort of post-apocalyptic dog-eat-dog world. They're supposed to be unrealistic and extreme, and noone is actually supposed to end up in absolute corners on the compass.)
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Fall_Child42
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Re: Politics

Post by Fall_Child42 » Sun Sep 02, 2012 10:35 am

Otohiko wrote:
Fall_Child42 wrote: How can somebody be against government involvement but pro social programs?
What does the bottom left corner have to do with social programs?

To simplify and extremize, bottom left corner is hippie utopia where no government or authority exists at all, but everybody lives in agreement with each other while respecting everybody else's uniqueness.

(Of course, consider the other 4 corners too, top left being a permanent "dictatorship of the proletariat", top right being cyberpunk-esque corporate hell, bottom right being Mad Max. They're supposed to be unrealistic and extreme, and noone is actually supposed to end up in absolute corners on the compass.)

If you are left economically you are pro taxation, protectionism, and government spending (likely on social programs)
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Re: Politics

Post by Fall_Child42 » Sun Sep 02, 2012 10:40 am

Also, how come in your extreme simplifications, the bottom left one was the only one you portrayed positively?
two of the others you described incredibly negatively, and the third just neutrally. I see your tricky language games.
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Otohiko
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Re: Politics

Post by Otohiko » Sun Sep 02, 2012 10:41 am

No, not really. Those things are not simply a matter of left-right, and are determined by up/down as well. Communism, for example, is not about government spending, taxation or protectionism at all (despite what Fox News says), but very clearly about the eventual elimination of all those things including government. You're forgetting that leftist economics and politics, by and large, are fundamentally about the eventual dissolution of the state, market economy, etc., and only see taxes and state mechanisms as means to get there (someday...) What you're describing are not "left economically" but very much "upper left", because that involves a definition of the state and its function, an inherently authoritarian construct.
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Re: Politics

Post by Otohiko » Sun Sep 02, 2012 10:42 am

Fall_Child42 wrote:Also, how come in your extreme simplifications, the bottom left one was the only one you portrayed positively?
two of the others you described incredibly negatively, and the third just neutrally. I see your tricky language games.
Lol, I dunno, hippie la-la land isn't necessarily positive. And if it may be positive, it's also the least realistic.
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Re: Politics

Post by EvaFan » Sun Sep 02, 2012 10:43 am

Decided to give it a try and not really surprised by the results. I would have appreciated a "Neutral" reaction to some of the questions that would not effect the results though.

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Re: Politics

Post by Fall_Child42 » Sun Sep 02, 2012 10:50 am

the definition of left right economics specific to this political compass is as follows.

The Economic (Left-Right) axis measures one's opinion of how the economy should be run: "left" is defined as the view that the economy should be run by a cooperative collective agency (which can mean the state, but can also mean a network of communes), while "right" is defined as the view that the economy should be left to the devices of competing individuals and organisations.

Any co-operative collective agency, even communes, requires some form of authoritarian control, so again I say that that entire lower left quadrant does not make any logical sense within the definitions set out by the political compass itself.
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Re: Politics

Post by Otohiko » Sun Sep 02, 2012 10:56 am

Oh you're playing language games too now. Cooperative collective agency != government involvement or social programs (in the sense of state-funded bureaucracy). The lower left is simply concerned with collective agency as something that works on the level of individuals (i.e. the right of everyone to have an individual say in the collective and to have their interest protected by the collective as far as possible). It doesn't make sense in the extreme, of course, but neither do the other corners.
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Re: Politics

Post by inthesto » Sun Sep 02, 2012 10:58 am

Fall_Child42 wrote:I have a question about this political compass.

How does this bottom left corner even make any sense?

How can somebody be against government involvement but pro social programs?

A strong government influence is needed in order to have social programs at all. Somebody with libertarian ideals should not be willing to accept anything like healthcare, having roads built for them, or free education. So in order to be left economically you would have to lean at least somewhat authoritarian.
The Y-axis isn't very well labeled, since "libertarian" already has another definition that is described by the second quadrant of the graph. What the Y-axis describes is the government's role in social policy, as opposed to economic policy. The positive end of the axis would be for government restricting personal freedoms whereas the negative is about the government allowing them. I don't know what the Canadian issues in question would be, but in the USA it's typically abortion, drug laws, and gay rights.

Furthermore, in spite of what capital L libertarian philosophy argues, I'd argue that it is possible for a government to legislate in favor of of freedoms. The easy examples would be Roe vs Wade, where the US federal government enforced a woman's right to choose to have an abortion regardless of where she lived, and the Civil Rights Act, where the government enforced an individual's right to not be denied service based on race, ethnicity, gender, etc. It's really not difficult to imagine personal rights that would otherwise be squashed if there were no governmental body to protect them.
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