Liberalism

Ok, let's talk a bit about this chart to the left of me. It's a political ideology graph, depicting many famous political and social leaders. The y axis reflects social opinions and the x axis is economic policy. Positive y is authoritarian, where the government has complete control and the negative y is libertarian, or complete social freedom. Negative x is communism, or complete economic equality and positive x is neoliberalism, or typical laisez-faire economic policy where there should be no interference in the economic private sphere.

Now that that's explained, hopefully you can understand why some of these figures are placed where they are. I brought this up to explain where I fell on the chart. I wish I could remember my exact numeric position, but basically I placed a little left of Nelson Mandela and slightly more positive than the Dalai Lama. I thought I was relatively close to Gandhi, but this portion of a different chart makes me think otherwise...

Anyway, this places me in quite an idealistic position. You may have been able to tell I'm obsessed with issues of social justice and believe in the idea that all people should have equal opportunity, and at least be able to live in comfortable circumstances as well as have the chance to move up in socioeconomic status. As I've said, this is the American Dream. A good way to sum up my opinions would be with John Rawl's Ethics, like "...the liberty principle, which advocates that each person should have an equal right to as many basic liberties as possible and still allow a similar system of liberty for all (Munson 2004)." and "...the difference principle [which] requires that social and economic inequalities be arranged so that they benefit those who are least advantaged."

These quiz results were the result of me staying up with two people until 5 in the morning Saturday night discussing American politics and the ideal American system. I just thought this would give you insight to my thinking strategy when it comes to some aspects of this class. I know not everyone will think the same way as me, but I want to strongly accent that I am extremely welcome to discussion of ideals. I do not want to be considered a close minded extremist; that's how America became as convoluted as it is today.

PS- The website is here!