Render unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar

Whenever I think about the Political Compass, I have to keep asking myself why it is I believe in government control of economic matters but great liberty in social matters. This is an important question as I apparently do feel strongly about both, as my location on the compass indicates. (For me, it doesn't feel like being extreme in any way, it's just commonsense. This could be partly due to the other thing this pic tells you, the fact that I don't associate with people whose views are very different from my own.)

Libertarians claim that they are being more consistent in embracing both freedoms but I don't buy it. As is often the case, Chomsky manages to express my instinct far more lucidly than I can:

John Maynard Keynes, the British negotiator, considered the most important achievement of Bretton Woods to be the establishment of the right of governments to restrict capital movement.

In dramatic contrast, in the neoliberal phase after the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system in the 1970s, the US treasury now regards free capital mobility as a "fundamental right", unlike such alleged "rights" as those guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: health, education, decent employment, security and other rights that the Reagan and Bush administrations have dismissed as "letters to Santa Claus", "preposterous", mere "myths".

It goes without saying that Keynes was far from being a socialist! This swing back towards government intervention is only going to bring the political spectrum back to centre, not to the left. Even if Americans will consider that the left.