This was initially posted at Eject! Eject! Eject! in the comments section (related to the essay Trinity). There had been a few general comments posted previously on economics, some of which had taken something of a political or ideological bent. Mr Peters here weighed in on the matter by staking out his central principle of laissez-faire economics. This started a fairly long series of essays back and forth between us.


On 7/18/2003 Mark Peters wrote:

My view on the prevailing concept of a "political spectrum" is that the spectrum is really a single point - and the point is false.

It's a single point because every position on the alleged spectrum takes
the same (wrong) view on fundamentals, and hence the whole thing collapses
down to one basic view. Whether left or right or in between, the idea that
individual lives are a means to an end is taken for granted, and is the moral
foundation of their politics.

For the left, our lives are a means to the ends of "society" or
"the public good". For the right, our lives are a means to the ends of God
or "tradition" - and in practice both of these often mean "society" or "the
public good".

This view is incompatible with the founding principle of the U.S.
- individual rights. People exist by permission, not by right if their lives
are a means to an end. Consequently, the left and the right both violate
our rights in countless ways. Both are based on a denial of the principle
of individual rights, and that's the false "point" I mentioned.

Instead of a spectrum for classifying political views, we just
need two buckets. All the political systems that are based on lives as a
means to an end (and hence a rejection of rights) go in one bucket; all
the political systems based on lives as ends in themselves (and hence an
acceptance of rights) go in the other bucket.

That first bucket is full: communism, socialism, fascism, religious
theocracy, monarchy, military dictatorship, mixed economy. The other bucket
has only one thing in it: capitalism ... and not the pseudo capitalism we
have today, but laissez faire.

Mark Peters

Return to the index for this subject.