A Quiz to Identify Your Ideological Perspective

Since I’m an out-of-the-closet libertarian with a track record of more than 5000 columns, there’s not much mystery about my philosophical outlook.

However, knowing my weakness for this kind of thing, a reader sent me an online “Political Sextant Quiz” and I naturally couldn’t resist.

Some of the questions were easy.

For instance, I know we shouldn’t abolish wages since that would be an extreme version of price controls. So “disagree” was the only sane answer.

Likewise, it’s a no-brainer (at least for me) to answer that I want government limited to core public goods (though fire services easily could be privately provided).

Other questions were harder to answer.

For instance, what does “my culture” mean in this next question, and what does it mean to say I “support those of my culture”?

Lacking any additional information, I interpreted this first question to be about my view on western civilization (rule of law, individual rights, etc), which I like. On the other hand, liking my culture doesn’t mean I want to reflexively put one of my neighbors “over” someone else.

So I opted for “slightly agree.”

And I gave the same answer for the second question because capitalism has produced immense material prosperity, yet “more than enough” implies that additional economic growth would be meaningless.

Needless to say, I wasn’t really happy with these questions.

The ambiguous wording left me wondering whether my answers would be interpreted the wrong way (such as being opposed to additional levels of production)?

But when I clicked to get my score, I was largely satisfied.

Since I want to get rid of 90 percent of government, it makes sense that I’m 90 percent anarcho-capitalist. I’ve never been sure what it means to be a bleeding-heart libertarian compared to a regular libertarian, but 88 percent seems reasonable. And I got my highest grade, 92 percent, for minarchism, which seems to a good description of my actual position.

Anyhow, here’s the link to the Political Sextant Quiz. See if you like your results.

And if you want to do more of this kind of thing, I’ve shared several other quizzes over the past decade.

• The Political Compass test (I’m a “right libertarian”).
• The Definitive Political Orientation test (I’m a “right libertarian”).
• The Circle test (I’m a “minarchist”).
• The Libertarian Purity test (I’m a “hard-core libertarian”).
• The 8 Values test (I’m a “libertarian capitalist”).
• The world’s smallest political quiz (I’m a “100-percent libertarian”).
• The 5-dimensional quiz (I’m a “conservative libertarian total-isolationist nationalist traditionalist”).