March 8, 2004
Ideological Purity
Well, in this case Libertarian Purity.
Radley Balko, noted Libertarian blogger, scored 98/160 which stikes me as fairly middle of the road though the test site calls this entering "...the heady realm of hard-core libertarianism." Then I saw in the comment thread that Julian Sanchez scored 79 and Jim Henley 101.
I would have expected these 3 folks to score higher, much higher and since they did not I suspect that how you score on this test has a lot to do with the perspective you use when taking the test and that for the results to be somewhat comparable this bias needs to be included. For instance, I took the test from the perspective of what I thought an anarcho-capitalist might answer and scored 153. Tomorrow I'll try to take it from the perspective of a libertarian min-archist and see what kind of score I get. Then I'll try again from the position of ok, I have libertarian leanings but what is practical in the near term (20-40 years).
Yazad raises some other issues with the test including that it is US centric and suggests some other tests that you can try.
Posted by Steve on March 8, 2004Yeah, non of those folks who are scoring so low are really extremists, buy libertarian standards. I think they all believe in public roads, stuff like that. Just like most lefties I know woulnd't come up 100% communist...
Posted by paul at March 8, 2004 5:56 PM
