Left vs Right

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Is it relevant in today's world?

The directions “Left” and “Right” come from a cute historical quirk which is irrelevant to today’s political discussion. Yet, their directionality implies an important dimension of political discussion. We quickly find out that this dimension has no definition, no units, no middle, and no terminals.

The scale that means the most to people — Freedom vs. Slavery — has no linear relationship to Left-Right.

This “dimension” has no meaning, and thus provides no information. It sorely needs to be replaced.

We need dimensions that mean something about politics.

Let us look at the “State of World Liberty”. It measures countries along the dimension of “freedom” versus “authoritarian”.

Each country is scored on two measures:
Economic Freedom: who owns your labor and product of your labor
Personal Freedom: who owns your body

Y-Axis: Personal Freedom Dimension: At 0% personal freedom, the ruling class totally owns your body and your actions: they may control, using threats of violence, your body and actions however they see fit. At 100% personal freedom, you may do whatever, however, whenever, with whomever you want with your own body. No one may legitimately use violence to control your body.

X-Axis: Economic Freedom Dimension: At 0% economic freedom, the ruling class totally owns your labor and the product of your labor: They may control and dispose of these — using threats of violence — however they see fit. At 100% economic freedom, you may do whatever, wherever, whenever, however, and with whomever you want with your own labor and with the product of your labor, and no one, including any ruler, has the legitimate right to stop you.

Notice that these two dimensions have measurable units (percentage of freedom).

Where is Left-Right?

Look carefully and you can locate the left-right dimension as the line bisecting the square at -45 degrees (the purple line).

• The “left” would be in the upper left corner — generally more in favor of you owning your own body, but the ruling class owning your labor.
• The “right” would be in the lower right corner — generally more in favor of the ruling class owning your body, but you owning your own labor.

Where is Freedom-Slavery?

We can find the freedom-slavery dimension (See diagram 1) as the line bisecting the square at +45 degrees (the green line).

• The totalitarian political movements would be in the lower left corner — fascism, nazism, and monarchism below the 45 degree line and anarcho-syndicalism, communism, socialism above the 45 degree line.
• The libertarian political movements would be in the upper right corner, with minarchists in the middle, with bleeding heart libertarians above the 45 degree line and Austrian consequentialists below the 45 degree line, and vountaryists and anarcho-capitalists occupying the far upper right corner.

A Third Dimension: Interventionism-Noninterventionism

I’ve often thought that a third dimension could provide us with a lot more clarity to the differences in our diverse political beliefs. The dimension I would suggest would be the degree to which our ruling class leaves foreign countries alone, going from 0% (imperialism, colonialism) to 100% (non-interventionism).

But notice that we have already left the useless “left” and “right” far behind, and are starting to talk about the real, underlying issues in politics.

What are the world's left wing and right wing countries?

I mapped those scores below, with the X axis being Economic Freedom and the Y axis being Personal Freedom. (The Left-Right dimension is the violet line at -45 degrees.)

Notice that the scores are highly correlated — as countries increase freedom in one dimension, they tend to increase freedom on the other dimension.

Here is the same graph, without the explanatory colors and identifying those countries that venture out of that centrist area:

We find three countries in the “Left” quadrant (Micronesia, Kiribati, Argentina) that have low economic freedom but relatively high personal freedom. But if you look into the libertarian quadrant, you can see many more countries that could be dropped onto that Left-Right dimension (Barbados, Finland, Netherlands, as well as the larger groups [A] and [C}.) These are better thought of as libertarian countries, but they also would be more leftist than centrist.

There are a few countries that are clearly in the lower right quadrant (Singapore, UAE, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia), that have high economic freedom but low personal freedom. However, three countries in the Authoritarian quadrant that could be dropped onto that Left-Right line and not be Centrist (Erita, Uzbekistan, Laos), but these are more correctly thought of as Authoritarian.

State of World Liberty then averages the two scores to collapse them onto the green Enslavement-Freedom dimension at +45 degrees. It then ranks all the countries from 1 to 180 along that line.

To create the colored map below, the rankings were subdivided into quintiles. (So quintile 1 contains countries ranked 1–36 in overall freedom.) Each quintile is assigned a color. The colors, in quintile order from most free to most authoritarian, are:
* Quintile 1. Blue
* Quintile 2. Green
* Quintile 3. Yellow
* Quintile 4. Orange
* Quintile 5. Red

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The Most Free Countries (2016):
1. New Zealand
2. Switzerland
3. Canada
4. Australia
4. Ireland
6. Finland
6. Netherlands
6. Denmark
6. Chile
6. Luxembourg

The Most Authoritarian Countries (2016):
180. North Korea
179. Syria
178. Eritrea
177. Turkmenistan
176. Cuba
175. Venezuela
174. Libya
173. Uzbekistan
173. Iran
173. Equatorial Guinea



(Aside: US is ranked #19)

You can get the spreadsheet and then weight the rankings according to your individual preference for the type of human freedom. :) (Spreadsheet: State of World Liberty)