Political Compass
This political test (may have to hit the link a couple of times to make it work) actually told me something about myself - highly educational.
I suppose it's because I've been reading one of his books lately, but on the scatterplot, I end up closest to the Dalai Lama, although I'm a bit to the right of him. If I were more authoritarian I could be Pope.
BTW, I don't think they have Friedman plotted correctly - I think he is less conservative and more libertarian than their plot implies. Most of the others look about right to me.
Be sure to take the "Iconochasms" quiz as well, which is where I found this quote:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed; those who are cold and are not clothed.
- Dwight D. Eisenhower
posted by Anonymous at 5:16 PM
7 Comments:
Places me right between Mandela and the Dalai Lama.
I believe in free markets as long as they actually have something to do with the ability of most people to choose their way of life freely. Which is not all that much, often enough. Free markets are a dream, and an fantasy ideology. Real markets are alternately productive and often horrifically destructive, and are good only inasmuch as they produce good, nothing more.
By their measure, this makes me rather an anarcho-syndicalist.
However, the authors have a naive view of Hitler, calling him, of all things, a Keynesian. Ludicrous. Just a silly to call Stalin a Keynesian, or for that matter, a Marxist. Sure fascism involved state employment - but it was in the immediate service of a violent, naked kleptocracy, simply a more direct way to control people and enrich the elite.
Remember Prof. Toynbee! Cyclic history and all that! Compare then(Weimar Germany) and now, see any trends? I know that the economy is stronger in our case, but we've been faced with serious erosion of civil liberties by "Scare Legislation" and I for one; don't like it!
By the large public works in times of trouble definition, Ramses II, Caligula, and Louis XVI were practicing Keynesian economics. When Ghengis Khan was "going Keynesian" he at least had the decency to support the arts and send the loot back home.
More importantly, the distinction between the state and corporation in the modern sense in Nazi Germany was all but obliterated. Deciding what was private and public ownership was the least of anyone's concerns; the state controlled the companies, the companies were owned by the people that propped up Nazis and the Nazis themselves, and they simply seized what they wanted and killed anyone who got in the way.
That ain't Hubert Humphrey.
Calling Nazi economic policy Keynesian is so broad it's meaningless, particularly as a way of classifying political definition, as the alternative political philosophy would be "PENNY-PINCHING bloodthirsty autocrats."
That list is short.
Maybe Pol Pot.
A meaningful definition of Keynesian must include a coherent notion of wide social benefit and a presumption of the rule of law. If they meant, as a political classification, "opposition to concentrated private accumulation of capital in a market structure," that would be rather more useful.
My vehemence here is out of a long-standing irriation with libertarians trying to tar Roosevelt with the implication that, really, his economics were just like Hitler's, if you are objective like us here libertarians.
There was a lot of energy in Roosevelt, but the autocrats were the capitalists opposing him, almost to the point, according to venerable Smedley Butler, of attempting a coup. It is not a small point that the captialist-conservatives like Ford were the ones who wanted to model America after Nazi germany.
Indeed! I believe Keynes shocking practical point was that carefully managed federal budget deficits and surplus can, through indirect government management of demand, contribute to growth or restrict spending as needed as an effective control on the economy.
Run for the hills!
But what I think the conservatives really feared was not the decline into dicatorship (far from it, to hear some media analysts blather on today about the alleged efficiencies of "non-democracies'), but the implied legitimization of transfer payments as a useful economic tool.
That was a big hole in their pockets.
Hmmm...I'm right on top of His Holyness (the Lama, not the Pope) at a -5, -5 Liberal/Libertarian rating. I didn't think we had anything in common, Gunga 'a Lunga.
Apparently I score the same as the Laird.
Only less so.
-4, -4 same area as the Lama.
< Tongue in cheek >
In terms of graphing styles, I have to wonder why they put Authoritarian Right in the upper right hand quadrant. Traditionally, in marketing graphs, this quadrant is reserved for the best products.
I'm not screaming "conspiracy", I just find it strange than Ralph Reed would get the coveted "upper right hand corner."
< / Tongue in cheek >
Finally, I'm somebody...an anarcho-syndicalist!
I appreciate the Keynes discussion. I'm no expert but I think Keynes (and the delectable R.G. Hawtrey) had the right idea at the right time. Unfortunately the grubbing liquidity whores ruled the day, an early useful example of money men not really understanding their pagan god, globalization, a vengeful, mercurial, and inscrutable fellow.
Still, I have to add in Keynes' humanizing understanding of the problem. He famously reminded us that in the long run we'll all be dead.
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