Political Spectrum: Redefining Right and Left

I find it quite confusing that most political spectra put varying levels of economic freedom on the left/right axis, and put varying levels of political freedom on the up/down axis. If an individual is not free from institutional coercion, then his economic freedom is transient and is entirely at the discretion of the political authority. For example, while most people feel a strong sense of economic freedom in the US, eminent domain laws allow the state to buy your property even if you choose not to sell it. This political spectrum, based on the policy recommendations and the desired ideals of each thinker, divides varying levels of economic concentration on the left/right axis, and divides varying levels of political concentration on the up/down axis. This is quite an important difference: while political equality is much more important and allows individuals and groups to voluntarily choose which societies to be a part of, the left/right axis simply measures personal opinions on what should be considered a public good and what should be considered a private good that can be bought, sold, or passed on through inheritance.

At the top of the spectrum lie totalitarian states in which all of the decision-making power of the nation lies in the hands of a small group of people. I chose red to represent the flags of statists such as Mao Zedong, Josef Stalin, and Adolf Hitler, in addition to the fact that red symbolizes aggression, as military force is the only method of maintaining such centralized authority. At the bottom of the spectrum lie (small-l) libertarians, who believe in the sovereignty of the individual to choose his associates and to make voluntary federations with other groups. I chose the black flag of anarchism to represent these thinkers, who are against institutional coercion.

At the right of the spectrum lie strong supporters of turning all land and goods into private property. At the left of the spectrum lie supporters of turning land and goods into public property that cannot be bought or sold by individuals. I chose gold for the right and green for the left to represent the historical struggle against the gold standard. Under the gold standard, the richest merchants were able to collaborate and control the supply of gold, allowing them to control the money supply and manipulate the value of the currency. The adoption of the greenback prevented this artificial scarcity of credit, and was an important victory in spite of the fact that many see this transition as the cause of recessions and financial crises (which is actually a result of the manipulative centralized control of the legal tender).

I will explain my rationale for the placement of each thinker in order to clear up any confusion ahead of time. While Stalin and Mao have traditionally been seen in a similar vein as Communists who collectivized all property, I believe that the methods they implemented are radically different. Under Stalin, all property was owned by the Communist Party, with a membership determined by Stalin's own individual authority, so in effect the entire resources of the nation were under the control of one man. On the other hand, Mao began his revolution by disenfranchising the large landowners and giving the land to the peasants to run communally. In addition, Mao's policies prevented economic concentration by keeping the people perpetually impoverished, whereas Stalin's CCCP was known to provide large economic incentives based on loyalty and rank within the party hierarchy. While Mao Zedong said himself that "political power grows out of a barrel of a gun," he is a rare individual who did not use this power to reward loyalty with unequal economic incentives.

To determine whether a thinker lies slightly to the left or slightly to the right of center, I examined his views on intellectual property rights and his rhetoric regarding the artificial scarcity of credit or land. While Rothbard disdained patent law and Hayek recommended a re-evaluation of copyright law, Konkin and the agorists were against both of these statist constructs.

While Adam Smith may not have had the foresight to predict the importance of intellectual property law, he recognized the dangers of corporate manipulation of government policy, stating that "whenever the legislature attempts to regulate the differences between the masters and their workmen, its counsellors are always the masters." In addition, he seemed to sympathize with the labor theory of value, and while he may have recognized that price was not accurately determined by the labor theory, he also recognized that monopoly privilege rather than the rarity of the material in the product may have a stronger effect on raising prices above their labor cost. As a result, the true value of a product might lie in the labor put into its production rather than in the scarcity of some raw material required in its production; this is not accurately reflected in price in light of the incentive to artificially decrease competition and supply, raising prices and profits to the benefit of owners.

While Benjamin Tucker still believed in the legitimacy of contract and private property, he lies to the left of the rest because of his belief that all forms of usury, including interest, rent, profit, and patent, were unjust, and his fundamental belief that enough free market competition would cause a product's price to approximate its production cost. While the removal of copyright laws would result in an increased level of income equality, recognition of the economic incentive to make goods and credit artificially scarce might help us to pave the way to a society in which the laborer is not a renter of the means of production, but merely a renter of credit, which will create a society in which the laborer receives the entirety of his production.