The Economic Spectrum

The traditional "left" vs "right" distinction came up during the French Revolution, when supporters of the King sat on the right in the National Assembly, and supporters of the revolution to the left.  This distinction has persisted in many parliaments and legislatures throughout the world, including our own.

Trying to put an individuals political leanings onto a simple one dimensional spectrum is doomed to fail.  How we select and replace leaders and representatives (the issue that the French National Assembly was concerned with) is completely different than how we run our economy.
  
I'll define the economic spectrum as half a circle.  I'll define "everybody is totally equal" communism to be at -90 degrees, and "no rules at all" laissez faire at +90.   There really haven't been such societies.  A few communes have come close, probably -80 or so...but every such society has had leaders.  There have been lots of societies that pass through +90, but it can't last more than a few days before someone with weapons and supporters takes over.  The dark ages hummed along at +45 or so--a new bandit or tyrant rising every few months to make everybody miserable. Somalia was probably about +75 in its darkest, most anarchistic days.    Soviet and Chinese communism in their heyday, I'll put at about -30, Korean maybe -60.  European Socialism, with democratically elected leaders, people working for wages appropriate to skill and demand, but a lot of redistribution, at about -10.  

America is the farthest right successful country in the world.  Lots of countries have been farther right, but they are disasters--as will America be if we continue on our present rightward tack.  Chile under Pinochet, Greece under the generals, and so forth.  Here are where a few famous Americans are, I think:  Obama, Clinton, Nixon, GHWB, Eisenhower are all at about +10. Reagan about +15, GWB claimed to be about +10 when he was running for office, but actually governed at +25--very much to our cost. The Kochs and other John Birchers are at about +50, and America will be over if they get more power than they already have. Bernie Sanders about -5. Noam Chomsky is at about -15, Angela Davis -30.

If you ask Americans to rate themselves on this scale, the Gaussian peak is probably about +15 with a standard deviation of about 5. However, if you ask people questions about specific issues--minimum wage, union rights, clean air, health insurance, etc., they'll come out pretty close to 0, again with a fairly narrow SD. This difference showed itself in the recent election in a number of places where they voted in higher minimum wage, marijuana legalization, gay rights and other "liberal" things, yet sent someone to congress who is dead set against all of those those.
 
Obama and Clinton are the most right wing democrats to have been president since the 19th century. Only the bubble presidents: Harding, Coolidge, Hoover, Reagan, GWB, are to their right.  Obama has done NOTHING to warrant the description "socialist".  The PPACA is very much a pro-business, pro-insurance, pro-free-market piece of legislation.  What came before had many of the bad aspects of monopoly, and in many cases, literally was a monopoly: price gouging, trapped consumers, poor service.

I'm pretty sure that no economic system that's more than about 15 away from zero on my chart can be stable without a pretty ruthless dictatorship. Friedman/Pinochet's Chile tried to be at about +30 and it didn't work.  China between 1949 and 1972 was at about -30 with the same effect.