gnosis
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 Posted: Mon Jul 14, 2008 2:37 pm Post subject: Understanding the Vosem Chart |
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From the link Jason_H supplies in his blog:
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/6/14/45425/6208
The Vosem Chart is an interesting concept. It moves the Nolan Chart into a new, third dimension. I was wondering if I could solicit Jason_H's help in explaining and understanding the concepts behind it.
One of the difficulties I am having is with the Cultural aspect of the chart:
| Quote: | CULTURAL
CLASS 1: A person belonging to the first camp in the cultural sphere supports cultural freedom. People in this camp believe in the right to have sex in any position or with any gender you want (assuming it's not rape), drug legalization, the right to burn the flag, the right to request one's life ended (suicide or euthanasia) and government non-regulation of things like prostitution, gambling and pornography. They welcome diversity in dress, means of expressive speech, language (including foreign languages being spoken in public), living arrangements, art, and ethnic varieties of food, recreation and religious ritual. Since they hold the view that activities that don't hurt anyone (except possibly the people engaging or requesting the activity themselves) should not be punished by the law, this means they believe such activity should not be punished regardless of who does it, and therefore they are strongly in favor of civil rights. Believe in equality regardless to gender, ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, religion, disability, nativity, socioeconomic class . . . Characteristic catchwords: government out of our bedrooms, tolerance, intolerance, consensual, victimless crime, do your own thing, born free, chains of society, fascist police state, gestapo. |
| Quote: | | Left, upper, anterior: Cultural freedom, a government that provides plenty of social services, and brakes on the power of business. This is your prototypical, all-around liberalism, including socialism or true communism. |
From my limited knowledge of history, cultural freedom was very limited under the communist government of Stalin. How can this be reconciled with the description which identifies "cultural freedom" with communism?
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Jason_Harvestdancer
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| Posted: Mon Jul 14, 2008 3:28 pm Post subject: |
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I think he's got a good idea, but I think the execution doesn't follow through as thoroughly as it should. It's long been known that American conservatives are economic interventionists, just of a different intervention than American liberals, and thusly should occupy the same corner of the Nolan Chart. The Vosem proposal divides the economic axis into two different economic axes.
The cultural axis is exactly the same as the cultural axis of the Nolan Chart. It is about our civil liberties and civil rights, matters non-economic.
The dilemna you are facing in understanding is that "Left upper anterior" is a three axis location while Cultural is simply one axis. There are four points that all share Cultural Class One, all four of them described as "left".
| Quote: | Left, upper, anterior: Cultural freedom, a government that provides plenty of social services, and brakes on the power of business. This is your prototypical, all-around liberalism, including socialism or true communism.
Left, upper, posterior: Cultural freedom, fiscally active government, and pro-big business. This is similar to the ideology, in a nutshell, of the British New Labour Party, so New Labour is what we're going to call it. This ideology has acquired some popularity in several European countries. People of this group have a positive, upbeat view towards the value of work and the power of corporations to do benevolent and fulfilling things. They believe that with just the right corporate leadership, the working man or woman can produce and be paid for commodities that can be enjoyed by all. Be it the Farmer, the Artist, the Engineer, or even the Bishop, their archetypical worker, as they see it, can create socially redeeming goods and services for which they will be paid by the state and/or industry, able to enjoy the fruits of the labors of others working in their ideal society. Unlike totalitarians, those in the New Labour camp believe in the freedom of businesses to innovate and choose what to produce.
Left, lower, anterior: Personal freedom, elimination of services such as welfare, social security and student money from the government, and anti-corporate ideology. This is the combination of anarcho-syndicalism. It's what many people call the "left-libertarians". More liberal than the libertarians, anarcho-syndialists are anti-government, but they find business to be behaving in too oppressive and authoritarian a manner. Your stereotypical anti-corporate, anti-WTO, anti-anything protestors.
Left, lower, posterior: Personal freedom, opposition to government spending, and free enterprise. Libertarianism, just as David Nolan, Harry Browne, and their co-partisans know it, fit here. When libertarians describe themselves as being "economically conservative", they mean they fit in the conservative group in both fiscal and corporate issues, being at the bottom and at the back of a Vosem Chart. Libertarians believe in the primacy of the individual, and hold the fiscal political views they do because of their belief in responsibility and independence from government. What goes on in someone's bedroom is nobody's business. |
As for whether an economically interventionist government can keep their hands off the cultural, that's what us libertarians have been trying to explain to liberals for decades.
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