this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2025
159 points (92.5% liked)
Political Memes
9887 readers
1115 users here now
Welcome to politcal memes!
These are our rules:
Be civil
Jokes are okay, but don’t intentionally harass or disturb any member of our community. Sexism, racism and bigotry are not allowed. Good faith argumentation only. No posts discouraging people to vote or shaming people for voting.
No misinformation
Don’t post any intentional misinformation. When asked by mods, provide sources for any claims you make.
Posts should be memes
Random pictures do not qualify as memes. Relevance to politics is required.
No bots, spam or self-promotion
Follow instance rules, ask for your bot to be allowed on this community.
No AI generated content.
Content posted must not be created by AI with the intent to mimic the style of existing images
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Your comment is propaganda.
Tell that to Marxist-Leninists or North Korea.
Tell that to conservatives or right-wing libertarians.
Wikipedia refers to division over Ancien Régime, ie, the monarchy & aristocracy of nobility classes. It was specifically over the right of the king to an absolute veto of the new constitution: opposers sat to the left of the president of the National Assembly & advocates sat to the right.
That's a distinction in political authority rather than entrepreneurial economics. That political power of the king aligns with social inequality & concentration of authority. In that society, social inequality was related to hierarchal authority of aristocratic & royal privileges culminating to the king. Their reforms had more to do with ending the unequal inherited privileges & authority of feudalism: legal equality (equal access to justice, equal legal punishment, equal eligibility to public office, equal taxability, equal imposition of authority) regardless of (aristocratic) class or birth.
Here's an exclusive: power[^power] is power. It's not always economic: wealth doesn't necessarily lead to power. Someone with enough iron or lead can carry off anyone's gold, so authority can deny wealth power. Authority also is power, so whoever has it[^has-authority] unrestricted necessarily poses a threat for subjugating others or repressing personal freedoms. Considering power that way is simply more general than claiming all power is economic & guarding against only that.
Power can come from anything: ability to inspire & indoctrinate, popular support, social ties, institutional (ideological, moral, traditional, governmental) legitimacy, (dis)information, expertise. People who haven't deluded themselves with idioticly reductive ideologies into thinking the only power is economic recognize this.
The National Assembly of the French revolution were keenly aware: they ended unequal power relations due to feudalism & lineage, not due to wealth, to gain personal freedom.
So, personal political freedom isn't entirely dependent on economic equality. That's why totalitarian communist states are considered as oppressive as fascist states despite corresponding to opposite ends of the political spectrum. That's why political scientists find utility in splitting distinct considerations like authority into separate dimensions: they reveal a similarity hidden by a simpler model.
There are other models with more solid academic work such as the cultural map of the world values survey along dimension of secular-rationalism & self-expression. There, ex-communist societies systematically cluster toward less self-expression.
If that's the case, then why are liberal democracies in Europe, Canada, East Asia, Australia more economically equal than most communist states? Could your approach is too reductive?
The same can be stated for all other freedoms. In a completely unregulated society, people would be free to abuse each other. Government authority already restricts people from abusing each other economically & non-economically. The huge concern you're overlooking is not abuse between individuals, but between the government & its people, ie, abuse of authority.
This and the rest you wrote are nonsense that overlooks the significant role of government in the abuse of individual liberties & rights throughout history. Government can authorize itself to abuse all rights & liberties equally or prohibit itself equally: both approaches can deliver social equality. It's a separable consideration as demonstrable by ideologies on the map failing to all align on a single diagonal line.
[^power]: the ability to influence or direct the actions, beliefs, or conduct. [^has-authority]: not necessarily the wealthy