Wilhelm Reich believed that the real political division wasn't between "capitalists" and "communists" but between the sexually repressive and the permissive, and that the permissive were superior to the repressive. So you have the relatively permissive Trilateral bloc (Europe/Japan/the US) vs the rest of the world, which is very repressive in comparison, although that is changing, at least in China and Russia, which, not coincidentally in my mind, are also becoming better places to live.
That said, I don't think that permissiveness will always be a good thing, primarily because there are many "permissive" organizations that can be coercive, like youth gangs and human trafficking rings. Choices in politics have a way of becoming obligations. Initially you are allowed to have or do something; in short time, people attempt to force or pressure people into doing it. So perhaps the problem isn't "repression" or "permission" so much as the desire to exert a strong social control of any kind.
