What makes one Left-Wing or Right-Wing?

Are there points or positions that all left wing people share? Are there points which all right wing people share? What makes someone left or right wing?

If you are pro-choice are you left or right wing? If so, what about abortion is left or right wing? Can you be left-wing and not be pro-choice? Can you be right-wing and be pro-choice?

For years socialist countries were opposed to abortion in their attempt to keep population levels high? Does that mean that being pro-choice is really "right wing?" No, the contrary decision by the Chinese to lower their population and increase abortion shows that there is nothing intrinsically "left" or "right" about abortion.

What about gay marriage? Can you be left-wing and be against it or be right-wing and be for it? If gay rights, culminating in gay marriage, was a left-wing issue then gay marriage, or at least greater rights for gays, would have been achieved in the former Soviet Union, China, Eastern Europe, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia and other places in the world which have embraced Marxist-Leninist philosophy.

Instead we saw homosexual men and women imprisoned and executed simply for being gay excuse me, for being a counter-revolutionary. The Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, China, and revolutionaries such as Che Guevara, considered homosexuality to be part-and-parcel of the bourgeois, decadent west.

What makes someone Left or Right? It's simple: do you want to live in a state which respects individual liberty or a state where experts/bureaucrats/those-who-know-better/dictators make virtually all decisions for you.

Is it more complicated than that? Yes. But not much - as it all boils down to the nature of individual liberty.