So they added a new “digital adult content” drop-down item to select in your Paypal business options but when you choose it your account will immediately be closed down. Just letting everyone know so they don’t get tricked! Even though this is a selectable item IT IS STILL ILLEGAL AND AGAINST PAYPAL POLICY TO SELL “SEXUALLY ORIENTED MATERIALS OR SERVICES”
asfdgsafsh
somebody outcompete the prudes and regulators of this pos corp
oh wait they can’t it’s probably illegal
somebody outcompete the prudes and regulators of this pos gov
Egalitarianism vs neutrality towards hierarchy vs hierarchy being a positive good Cosmopolitanism vs nationalism Individualism vs communitarianism Economic efficiency is good vs economic efficiency is dehumanizing Nature is a resource vs nature should be protected for its own sake vs we belong to nature Importance of tradition Importance of “order” Importance of autonomy Belief in the availability of positive-sum improvements Belief in the degree of coordination necessary to achieve/prevent positive/negative-sum changes Belief in collective responsibility Acceptability of coercion Acceptability of violence in general
On a more serious note, I always liked the three-axis chart from the online game NationStates (though the game itself has a very left-wing bias).
Okay, this chart is actually not that good. First of all, it undercounts the significance of economic freedom; and second, it truncates it into a single axis while I’d argue that a two-axis (at least) model of economy would be better.
Economic freedom is inevitably tied to personal and political freedom, as human behavior is economic behavior. There is no magical boundary between economic and personal. These are probably obvious, but I’m just making the background assumptions clear.
For example, how does sex work work in a “Scandinavian Liberal Paradise”? It supposedly has high personal freedom, but as sex work ties the personal to the economic very tightly I highly suspect that SLP wouldn’t have the Obviously Correct policy of decriminalization and non-regulation; instead it’d be likely to have a lot of licensing and regulation schemes intruding on sex workers’ bodily autonomy (if they’re at all legal in the first place).
Or drugs. If you can use drugs, but only if you buy them from Systembolaget, and they must be manufactured by licensed businesses, and they must have been approved by the state regulatory apparatus, it’s not such a high level of personal freedom.
Or in the different direction: “Corporate Police State”. Economic “freedom”? I don’t think so. Trans people can’t buy estrogen, people can’t trade anti-government material, Sex work is B&, drug users get V&.
And what exactly is “Benevolent Dictatorship”? The government rules with an iron fist, but it doesn’t actually do much? Emperor Norton? Distributed power is distributed power and jure isn’t magic.
The personal and political are tied as well, but at least the political axis makes a bit more sense; “Conservative Democracy” vs. “Tyranny by Majority” vs. “Authoritarian Democracy” are distinctions I can intuitively grasp from this model.
But “Economic Freedom” is my favorite axis (because I’m really boringly consistent on “Personal”, and “Political” is mostly “could we just please make it go away somehow”) so I want to focus more on that one, and this assumes that there’s a simple unidirectional form. In other words, a society with heavy state intervention in the economy to reduce inequality would be basically the same as a society with heavy intervention to preserve inequality. That doesn’t make much sense.
A more meaningful distinction would be to divide the economic axis by that one. Thus, we get a two-dimensional graph which could be said to roughly resemble the traditional Political Compass (which is a shitty test with shitty questions and shitty background assumptions) or the Nolan Chart (which similarly confuses two drastically different forms of economic intervention into a less-than-useful mess):
(one could add a third dimension for public goods and other utilitarianisms but that’s basically “how smart is the implementation of this particular location on the 2D grid”)
In the bottom right quadrant is non-intervention regardless of its direction. Libertarian, classical liberal, ancap, etc.
The bottom left only has intervention to seek equality; pure redistribution, regulations that try to level society, eliminating the hierarchies that would naturally result from differences between people. Anarcho-communist, liberal socialist, etc.
The top right only seeks to keep hierarchies intact and deepen them, to maintain the position of those at the top and prevent challenges to their status. Crony capitalism, slavery, feudalism, state-sponsored cartels, corporate welfare, and all forms of nonproductive rentseeking with the guns of PoliceMob.
And the top left combines both; one might cynically say that efforts towards equality help legitimize efforts towards hierarchy, and efforts to maintain hierarchy help secure elite acceptance for redistribution.
And if one were to redefine the NationStates examples to this, one could get the sorts of results I’ve located as examples on the grid.
Basic income is perhaps the biggest example of a bottom-left policy, while regular forms of welfare establish hierarchies between the eligible and ineligible, the “deserving” and “undeserving” and so on, and are more top-left instead. Closed borders and protectionism are topwards, and the rhetorical swindle that gets people to support them paints them as leftwards instead. And patents and copyrights are classic topwards examples.
The most important thing in this is that the axes aren’t what they are traditionally thought to be; the Political Compass is shitty because it bundles them into one single axis as a result of its creators’ biases (its economic axis is all over the place; some questions are bottom-left vs. top-right, others are top-left vs. bottom-right, some implicitly present a false dilemma between top-left and top-right, etc.), and a lot of valid complaints ensue. The most simple formulation would perhaps be: “should redistribution happen downwards, upwards, or both, or not at all?” (Although when presented this way most people would shy away from admitting the positions their policies reveal a preference for)
This is illuminating of the tensions in state intervention to the economy and also perhaps helps understand different perspectives better. The left is suspicious of “economic freedom” because they’re used to it meaning top-right (because statist politicians are usually only offering a choice between top-right and top-left), and the top-left is a really profitable place for huge numbers of people with powerful special interests. And when leftists say “not the Soviet Union” they often mean “bottom-left, not top-left”. And when the Political Compass™ sorts Kevin Carson at the “same” “economy” score as statist corporatists, this model illustrates the massive difference.
(Of course, it gets weird at the edges but works reasonably well at the centre region; and these kinds of simplified models are always only useful around the centre)
And while this seems to resemble the traditional Political Compass™, the “Social” score is nowhere near 1:1 to this. A centrist position on this model of economic axes can encompass quite an astonishing variation in moral and cultural policy, although as they aren’t quite orthogonal either it’s impossible to be politically authoritarian at the bottom right, or genuinely socially permissive at the top left.
Decriminalisation in New South Wales just survived the most concerted attack of any decriminalised jurisdiction so far, as the multi-year false flag campaign of the biggest brothels to try to criminalise their competition just spectacularly fell on its arse. You’ve got Liberal ministers telling the national press that licensing regimes have failed elsewhere.
And this is with a conservative government, whose own committee chairman was an extremely anti-sex work Christian extremist. Against all odds, state Cabinet has listened to reason, and NSW decriminalisation appears safe for the foreseeable future.
safe hooking, shitty burgers: the NSW 2016 story
The whole state has shitty burgers? Why?
I am honestly always surprised that even this kind of extremely basic civilizational adequacy is occasionally able to exist…
