do they differ in different nations?

how come nobody knows this?

ok ok i get it now. lol
left wing = tax and spend
right = hold on to what you got

no, left wingers are those who advocate change, while right wingers are those who are set in their ways.

in finland a left winger would be in favour of tax and welfare cuts, while in america that would be a right winger. left/right wing is relative to the government. not universal.

no, left wingers are those who advocate change, while right wingers are those who are set in their ways.

in finland a left winger would be in favour of tax and welfare cuts, while in america that would be a right winger. left/right wing is relative to the government. not universal.

Leftwingers in finland do not really advocate tax cuts. The rightwingers in finland advocate taxcuts for businesses.

A rightwinger in Finland would be a extreme leftwinger in the USA. An extreme leftwinger in Finland would be a 'radical' (or foreing insurgent :p ) in the USA.

Yes, left-wing and right-wing differ in different nations.

What they call a liberal in the USA is an rightwing extremist in Finland. What they call a republican in the USA would be close to a fascist in Finland. Actually, no, they would be a social pariah.

There was a concept shift in the definition of the “left” and “right” during the XVIII – XX centuries. According to A. De Swaan (Coalition theories and cabinet formation. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1973. p. 165) there is only one really important question, which organizes a structure of the party system. Roughly speaking since the French Revolution the main problem of the most European political systems was the question of democratization. Young bourgeoisie fought for its rights to rule. So left (bourgeois) wing wanted changes, which meant more freedom at that time. But by the 20th of XX this problem of democratization had been more or less solved. The question of power was replaced by the question of bread. Working parties appeared almost in all European countries. Proletariat demanded for new changes, which meant social security and consequently the increasing of the role of the state in economics. Right wing tried to preserve freedom (hold on to what you got), which meant lower level of social protection and taxes. Thus nowadays party systems of all countries differ from one another, but the main traits of left and right wings are common. Of course Finnish left are not like American left, but everybody knows what the difference is (especially inside one country). If the main problem of the country is not social protection of the population, but still freedom and democratization the definitions may be very tangled. (Such situation took place during the last years of Soviet Union, when communists (left for the whole world) were called “right”, and liberals were called “left”).

In America the Republican and Democratic parties have both become statist parties. They have both adopted the principle that people cannot be trusted to create private institutions to efficiently and fairly provide services. They disagree slightly on the services that must be provided with the highest priority, for example the Democrats think that giving every child a uniform education regardless of how his parents would like to raise him is a high priority whereas the Republicans give more priority to keeping the children of other nations from entering the country to get that education. They disagree perhaps a little more strongly on the philosophy behind those services, for example the Democrats think that the seats in those schools should be allocated on the basis of the students' race, whereas the Republicans prefer their parents' income to be the deciding factor.

But both parties have the goal of eventually nationalizing all of the important activities in the country. They have already done this with education, health care, charity and transportation, and they both want science, energy and information to be next.

In order to do this they both believe in heavy taxation. The methods differ in ways that are relatively unimportant. The Republicans want to tax citizens directly, whereas the Democrats want to tax corporations and the people who invest in them, so the tax burden will "trickle down" to the consumers.

There is no important difference between the foreign policies of the two parties. Claims of promoting peace, democracy, free markets, civil rights, and other noble ideals are always trumped by political considerations and both parties have routinely supported incompetent, repressive or downright despotic regimes.

"Right" and "Left" have traditional meanings in America. "Right" means what most people call "conservative," but only as it applies to American culture, such as traditional religion, the subjugation of women, marital fidelity and forbearance from premarital sex, drug use limited to alcohol, tobacco, caffeine and those manufactured by the pharmaceutical industry, war as a force for stifling international disagreements, and a survival of the fittest economy. "Left" means "liberal," but again only the peculiar American style of liberalism, such as pacifism, libertine behavior, compulsive iconoclasm, intellectualism, avant-garde art, and a socialist-influenced economy.

It has been many years since either party aligned with these goals. For example, fifty years ago both the Democratic and Republican Parties adopted the complete platform of the Communist Party of the 1920s, when it had the strength to be taken seriously. Both parties advocate censorship and both have promoted wars of horrifying scope.

In short, both parties have failed to follow the laws set forth in the Constitution, and have in fact used it as toilet paper, since Franklin Roosevelt came to power in 1933.

In America the Republican and Democratic parties have both become statist parties. They have both adopted the principle that people cannot be trusted to create private institutions to efficiently and fairly provide services. ...

It has been many years since either party aligned with these goals. For example, fifty years ago both the Democratic and Republican Parties adopted the complete platform of the Communist Party of the 1920s, when it had the strength to be taken seriously. Both parties advocate censorship and both have promoted wars of horrifying scope.

In short, both parties have failed to follow the laws set forth in the Constitution, and have in fact used it as toilet paper, since Franklin Roosevelt came to power in 1933.

YES! :D My thoughts exactly... I got into an argument with somebody about this the other day.... he called me an "anarchist" :rolleyes: .

Redcard Bluecard. Where is the freedom card?

We have to be careful how we explain our views to people. They're fond of dismissing us libertarians by saying that we believe the solution to bad government is no government. In fact what we believe is that the solution to too much government is less government.

Nonetheless, most Americans have been bribed, coerced, brainwashed and lulled into believing, at least unconsciously, that a vast array of vital functions in life can only be performed effectively by government. It helps to have information to the contrary ready for them, but you have to be able to craft it into the sound bites they're accustomed to.

For example (this one is at least ten years old so forgive me if the figures need an update): the Archiocese of New York educates almost exactly half as many students as the New York City school system. Everyone knows graduates of both systems and there's little argument that the quality of both educations is comparable. Yet the Catholic schools have only one-tenth as many administrative staff as the public schools.

For example: People are able to cheat on welfare because the government's rules for eligibility are arcane and complicated, people make careers out of learning how to beat them, and government employees are specifically forbidden from judging whether their clients are telling the truth. The Salvation Army has no such constraints. Their staff use their "people skills" to distinguish the needy from the greedy, and there is no appeal.

For example (again this is about ten years old): If all the money collected by our various levels of government specifically to fund poverty programs were simply tossed into a pile, divided up equally, and given directly to the poor without using most of it to pay twelve layers of bureaucrats to "administer" each other, every poor family in America would suddenly have an income of $40,000 per year.

ok ok i get it now. lol
left wing = tax and spend
right = hold on to what you got
its goes much further than that, far left wing is socialism and communism and extreme right parties have included tha nazi party

We libertarians chart political philosophies on a two-dimensional graph, where right and left are roughly as you state but down is statism and up is libertarianism--or as we simply call it, freedom. Generally the left initially champions social liberty and the right economic liberty. But as they progress closer to achieving their initial agenda they can't help co-opting each other's programs and they both sink to the bottom of the chart.

Nazi was an acronym in German for "National Socialism" and although its roots were in the fascist right its platform was indeed liberally sprinkled with constraints on economic liberty. On the left, Stalin's and Mao's Communist Parties' curtailment of social liberties are too legendary to require identification.

Once governments get into the habit of suppressing freedom, they just can't stop.

How much of a Stalinist are you?


The Political Compass
http://www.politicalcompass.org

Welcome to The Political Compass.

There's abundant evidence for the need of it. The old one-dimensional categories of 'right' and 'left', established for the seating arrangement of the French National Assembly of 1789, are overly simplistic for today's complex political landscape. For example, who are the 'conservatives' in today's Russia? Are they the unreconstructed Stalinists, or the reformers who have adopted the right-wing views of conservatives like Margaret Thatcher?

On the standard left-right scale, how do you distinguish leftists like Stalin and Gandhi? It's not sufficient to say that Stalin was simply more left than Gandhi. There are fundamental political differences between them that the old categories on their own can't explain. Similarly, we generally describe social reactionaries as 'right-wingers', yet that leaves left-wing reactionaries like Robert Mugabe and Pol Pot off the hook.

That's about as much as we should tell you for now. After you've responded to the following propositions during the next 3-5 minutes, all will be explained. In each instance, you're asked to choose the response that best describes your feeling: Strongly Disagree, Disagree, Agree or Strongly Agree. At the end of the test, you'll be given the compass, with your own special position on it.
I've just taken the test and scored:

Economic Left/Right: -7.63
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -4.36

I'm disappointed to find that I'm a bit of a hand-wringing libertarian and not much like my all-time hero Stalin at all, even though I would quite happily mount the still-bleeding heads of the rich on spiked poles.

Take the test and post your results here.

Your political compass
Economic Left/Right: -5.88
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -4.00


I'm Gandhi.

Fascist.

Flatterer http://us.i1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/i/mesg/emoticons7/5.gif

Economic Left/Right: -7.38
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -4.82

The Left in Canada would be considered Marxist-Leninist in the USA, for sure.

The Right in Chirac's conservative France would be socialist in the USA.

A US Democrat would be considered an ultra rightist in Europe and a US centrist would be considered a rightwinger in Australia.

Left -1.5, Libertarian -4.8. No surprise. One of the minority of libertarians who started out as a liberal. I was actually a registered member of the Peace and Freedom Party once. That makes me one of the minority of libertarians who is not a curmudgeon. :)

That was a hard test. Some of those situations were things I'd never thought about. On some of them I really didn't prefer any of the choices. I would have liked a five-point scale in which 3 means neutral.

Also some of the decisions are tricky. "Do you believe that such and such is necessary?" Well that depends on whether you're talking about the real world we live in or an ideal one in which all of the libertarian answers I've given have become public policy.

I've just started a poll to gauge the demographics of sciforums on the political compass.

See here:

http://www.sciforums.com/showthread.php?t=58215

Left -1.5, Libertarian -4.8. No surprise. One of the minority of libertarians who started out as a liberal. I was actually a registered member of the Peace and Freedom Party once. That makes me one of the minority of libertarians who is not a curmudgeon. :)

That was a hard test. Some of those situations were things I'd never thought about. On some of them I really didn't prefer any of the choices. I would have liked a five-point scale in which 3 means neutral.

Also some of the decisions are tricky. "Do you believe that such and such is necessary?" Well that depends on whether you're talking about the real world we live in or an ideal one in which all of the libertarian answers I've given have become public policy.

How come I am more libertarian than you fraggle. I'm a socialist. You are a libertarian.

spurious, you do knwo aboutt he long strain of what we might as well acll liberatrian socialism? Or communism being actually in some cases being close to anarchism?

i was surprised by that result really, last test i did said i was on the right wing rather than the left

So, can we plot everyone on a political spectrum chart?

How come I am more libertarian than you fraggle. I'm a socialist. You are a libertarian.I don't know. I'm probably older than you, I could be the grandfather of most of the people here. My perspective made the test very difficult. As I said in a previous post, I found many of the questions ambiguous, because my answer would be quite different in the ideal libertarian society than in the real world.

Many of the questions asked me to choose a particular group for the government to concentrate its services or its taxation on. We believe that government services should be minimal and that except in wartime most of them should be funded by user fees just like any other business. So how the hell am I supposed to answer those questions?

I ended up having to make a political choice--given the way the country is now organized, which of the available bad choices is the least bad?

A young libertarian would probably choose the one that mechanically conforms most closely to the Constitution, regardless of the immediate consequences, and try to build a world in which his grandchildren can finish the building of a libertarian utopia. An older libertarian who considers himself an elder and cares about his people will sigh and accommodate their weaknesses and try to build a world in which his grandchildren will be happy even if they don't agree with him.

In addition to pulling me up from the bottom end of the Y axis this is surely what pulls me a little to the left of center on the X axis. I don't believe in imposing a system on people who don't really want it, regardless of whether the reason they don't want it is that they've been brainwashed by an unconstitutional government for seventy years.

One of the tenets of libertarianism is that peaceful people must be permitted to emigrate and immigrate without restricion. This applies to me as well. If I don't like it here, I have the option of going somewhere else. I don't have to sit here and rail at everyone because I think they're too stupid to see the truth. That sounds too uncomfortably similar to religion.

That said, I doubt that any libertarian leaders were involved in the crafting of this test.

We have no insight into how it was scored but as I said many of the questions don't provide a choice that clearly reflects a libertarian philosophy. In addition the scoring grid is illogical. There's no such thing as a "socialist libertarian" because at the core of socialism is a command economy and at the core of libertarianism is a free market. The two philosophies are fundamentally incompatible.

The test we use, which has only ten questions, plots your score on a diamond grid. Socialist tendencies pull you to the southeast, fascist to the southwest. Economic freedom pulls you to the northwest, freedom on social issues pull you to the northeast. This produces a chart that is more familiar. "Leftists" are strongly restrictive of economic freedom and champions of social freedom, and they end up being balanced by those vectors off at the extreme left end of the X axis but at zero on the Y axis. "Rightists" similarly end up directly opposite them with their draconian restrictions on personal freedom and their reverence for unfettered capitalism.

"Statists" on the other hand, restrict freedom of both kinds. They end up at the bottom of the Y axis and in the center of the X axis. Stalin and Hitler were both down there and there was in fact no practical difference between them, only rhetorical. Libertarians champion both kinds of freedom and we end up at the top of the Y axis and the center of the X axis. Thomas Jefferson would have been up there.

There's no way in reality for someone to be at either extreme end of both axes. The test we're given here doesn't recognize that reality. You can't be a "free-market authoritarian" or a "socially liberal despot." Today's Nanny-State "liberals" are hardly leftists. They are authoritarians who believe that the government knows what's best for you both in your financial affairs and in your family life. Nor are today's tax-and-spend "conservatives" true right-wingers. They don't even maintain the illusion of a free market, the government has a stranglehold on the economy through taxation, regulation, tariffs, and immigration controls.

Seconded, Fraggle. On the test you speak of (I'm guessing "The World's Smallest Political Quiz" (http://www.theadvocates.org/quiz.html)), I score only one tick below Thomas Jefferson--down towards the center. And yet in the other quiz, I'm apparently a neo-liberal anarchist... or rightist libertarian...

The World's Smallest Political Quiz was devised by libertarians. I would trust the results. It accounts for the realities that there's no such thing as a socialist libertarian or a despotic anarchist.

The "left" promotes social liberty but controls the economy. The "right" protects the free market but enforces traditional moral behavior. Libertarians want both social and economic freedom with minimal government. Authoritarians want government control over everything. Today's American nanny-state "liberals" and tax-and-spend "conservatives are not "leftists" and "rightists." They are both dropping rapidly toward the authoritarian bottom of the chart from different directions and in the fall they are losing their "leftist" and "rightist" characteristics. (Our chart reverses the top and bottom of the one used in this test, if anyone is confused by what I just said. Libertarians are at the top because it's our chart. :))

Our compass is rather straightforward and conforms nicely to the reality of 20th century politics because our chart chops off all four corners of the one that the test on the posted website uses. Those corners are the political equivalent of "imaginary numbers" in math. You can write those scores down but it's impossible for anyone to actually have them. Any test that gives somebody a score of -3/-5 is not measuring libertarianism. And I doubt that the people who populate the other three political poles would agree that the test measures them accurately either.

I don't know. I'm probably older than you, I could be the grandfather of most of the people here. My perspective made the test very difficult. As I said in a previous post, I found many of the questions ambiguous, because my answer would be quite different in the ideal libertarian society than in the real world.

I'm 36. I have grown from moderate conservative when I was very young (be like daddy) to a rather radical political ideology over the years. It just seems to get worse.


Many of the questions asked me to choose a particular group for the government to concentrate its services or its taxation on. We believe that government services should be minimal and that except in wartime most of them should be funded by user fees just like any other business. So how the hell am I supposed to answer those questions?

Don't know. I ended up answering several questions with merely agree, or disagree, but it could just have well been the opposite. Disagree instead of agree. When a question actually contained a principle I valued I of course choose strongly agree or disagree. The test was indeed severly flawed, but it seemed easier to come up with a reasonable answer than the test in the other thread. I could not answer most questions at all.




A young libertarian would probably choose the one that mechanically conforms most closely to the Constitution, regardless of the immediate consequences, and try to build a world in which his grandchildren can finish the building of a libertarian utopia. An older libertarian who considers himself an elder and cares about his people will sigh and accommodate their weaknesses and try to build a world in which his grandchildren will be happy even if they don't agree with him.

The funny thing is that I do not really believe in a minimal government. That is I do believe in a minimal government as in minimal bureacracy and a small political system, but not in a minimal social system provided by the nation for its citizens. I do believe in a strong and extensive social structure, which is of essential importance to maintain healthy social dynamics and to minimize social inquality.



One of the tenets of libertarianism is that peaceful people must be permitted to emigrate and immigrate without restricion. This applies to me as well. If I don't like it here, I have the option of going somewhere else. I don't have to sit here and rail at everyone because I think they're too stupid to see the truth. That sounds too uncomfortably similar to religion.

Can't agree more. I don't even live in my own country and I don't want to.


That said, I doubt that any libertarian leaders were involved in the crafting of this test.
I think so too. I think this test was made for the 'normal' people who easily fit within existing mainstream political structures.


We have no insight into how it was scored but as I said many of the questions don't provide a choice that clearly reflects a libertarian philosophy. In addition the scoring grid is illogical. There's no such thing as a "socialist libertarian" because at the core of socialism is a command economy and at the core of libertarianism is a free market. The two philosophies are fundamentally incompatible.

Socialism is just as dependent on a command economy as is conservatism. Socialism is about equality within society and about incorporating social morals into the infrastructure of society. You do not need to command the economy to do this. You can let it be as free as you want. The only limitation is that there can be measures to insure that equality is maintained. A cap on wealth for individuals. Stricter regulation for companies regarding the wellfare of the employee. That in itself will not command the economy. It will just protect the citizen from being used beyond reasonable terms. You cannot be a free citizen if some citizens have powers out of proportion to the rest.

In the 'conservative' economy of america (which is btw not the most free economy in the world) all the regulations are aimed at favouring the corporation and not the individual. In a socialist economy the focus is merely changed to the individual. Quite similar to the libertarian ideas I'll imagine.




There's no way in reality for someone to be at either extreme end of both axes. The test we're given here doesn't recognize that reality. You can't be a "free-market authoritarian" or a "socially liberal despot." Today's Nanny-State "liberals" are hardly leftists. They are authoritarians who believe that the government knows what's best for you both in your financial affairs and in your family life. Nor are today's tax-and-spend "conservatives" true right-wingers. They don't even maintain the illusion of a free market, the government has a stranglehold on the economy through taxation, regulation, tariffs, and immigration controls.

Maybe people are just not logical or consistent.