Moral Libertarian Perspective: False Political Maps give us False Promises of Collectivist ‘Liberty’ Ever since the classical left-right political axis of the French Revolution became woefully inadequate to describe the variety of existing political platforms, there have been various proposals of two-dimensional models. The most common version, the one that appears to have become the new de-facto standard, involves adding a socially libertarian vs authoritarian scale in the vertical axis, leaving the horizontal left-right axis to economic matters. This is the kind of map that online tests like Political Compass use. The fact that Political Compass has inspired a countless amount of memes from all sides of the political landscape shows the level of common acceptance of this model.
However, what is commonly accepted is not necessarily what is correct. After all, it was commonly accepted that the Earth was flat in the middle ages too! In fact, I have identified one important flaw in map: part of the map cannot practically exist. Which part of the map am I taking about? The part where you can have next to no economic freedom but lots of social freedom, i.e. the bottom left corner in Political Compass. Of course I understand that economic freedom is not perfectly correlated with social freedom. There have been societies which were dictatorships but had lots of economic freedom (e.g. Pinochet’s Chile), and there are 116
