The Libertarian Purity Test

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The Libertarian Purity Test

Postby Matt the Czar » Fri Jun 10, 2016 4:07 am

http://www.bcaplan.com/cgi-bin/purity.cgi

"This is the Libertarian Purity Test, which is intended to measure how libertarian you are. It isn't intended to be any sort of McCarthyite purging device -- just a form of entertainment, hopefully thought-provoking. I like it a lot better than the more famous "World's Shortest Political Quiz" because I haven't stated the questions with any intent to give an upward bias to a test-taker's score, and because it gives a clearer breakdown between hard and soft-core libertarians. Enjoy, suggest your friends try it out, and see how you compare to other test-takers..."

I got an 18.

"16-30 points: You are a soft-core libertarian. With effort, you may harden and become pure."
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"Operation Prepare Your Anus is considered to have been the most thoughtfully planned and masterfully executed humanitarian intervention in American history."-DTanza, alternatehistory.com

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I.. I would just GIVE it to them.- CMSellers.
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Re: The Libertarian Purity

Postby ghijkmnop » Fri Jun 10, 2016 4:15 am

Redacted
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Last edited by ghijkmnop on Fri Mar 15, 2019 10:12 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: The Libertarian Purity Test

Postby Matt the Czar » Fri Jun 10, 2016 4:17 am

"1-5 points: You have a few libertarian notions, but overall you're a statist."

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Not as related, but I found this funny.

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"Operation Prepare Your Anus is considered to have been the most thoughtfully planned and masterfully executed humanitarian intervention in American history."-DTanza, alternatehistory.com

Now as a very moral person, I would never sell a pot brownie to a toddler.
I.. I would just GIVE it to them.- CMSellers.
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Re: The Libertarian Purity Test

Postby Windy » Fri Jun 10, 2016 4:20 am

0 points: You are not a libertarian by any stretch of the imagination. You are probably not even a liberal or a conservative. Just some Nazi nut, I guess.

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Re: The Libertarian Purity Test

Postby Deathclaw_Puncher » Fri Jun 10, 2016 4:36 am

16:You are a soft-core libertarian. With effort, you may harden and become pure.
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Re: The Libertarian Purity Test

Postby cmsellers » Fri Jun 10, 2016 5:29 am

And here I thought this was going to be a debate on whether the libertarian movement's insistence on purity tests is a good idea, and was wondering who on TCS would possibly argue in favor.
The Libertarian Purity Test wrote:Your score is...

37

31-50 points: Your libertarian credentials are obvious. Doubtlessly you will become more extreme as time goes on.

I can't quite tell whether the author is joking. While the test itself is tongue-in-cheek, does the author actually expect me to become more extreme?

I've actually become less extreme compared to where I was at one point. In high school after abandoning socialism, I read Alongside Night, was impressed and largely adopted agorist views. That lasted a few months, until I seriously thought through a number of implications that I hadn't. After that, I read Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom and concluded that the solution to everything was more markets. That lasted almost a year, at which point my views shifted to roughly where they are now: strongly libertarian on social issues and mildly so on economic issues. Since that point, my political beliefs have been fairly stable.

Probably the only way in which I've moved more towards the libertarian view is on environmental issues. While I still consider myself a conservationist, I've become more in favor of domestic exploration for fossil fuels as a reaction to our involvement in the Middle East. I've also become considerably more skeptical of the regulatory powers the Fish and Wildlife Service has under the Lacey Act and Endangered Species Act, on account of them listing non-invasive species and non-native species respectively under those acts for what seems to be political reasons.

I've also become more skeptical of zoning regulations; going from "zoning regulations are absolutely necessary" in high school to "zoning regulations are too strict" in college to "zoning regulations are usually unnecessary," after moving to Texas and seeing lax zoning in action. And I've become more skeptical of foreign aide after a slew of books came out suggesting that foreign aid actually damages the development of poor countries; but I don't have an objection to us giving money to other countries if that money can do good.

However I've also become much more strongly in favor of welfare, going from "welfare should be only available in limited circumstances" to "we need a much stronger safety net." That runs strongly counter to libertarian principles, though at least some libertarians seem to favor a universal basic income, which is even more radical. Incidentally, basic income is probably something I would probably support; though I haven't considered it too closely because it's not really become part of the national consciousness.

Less strikingly, I've also abandoned the libertarian idea that government recognition of marriage should be ended with marriage replaced by private contracts and religious ceremonies. This is a combination of my realization that we might actually have marriage equality nationally (something I realized sometime towards the end of undergraduate) and my shift from indifference towards other people getting married towards favoring it.

There's probably other ways that I've shifted too that I'm not recalling, but I've broadly favored free trade; progressive taxation; government investment in infrastructure; government regulation for health, safety, and environmental purposes; reduction in regulations generally; reduction in the defense budget; entitlement reform; and an end to corporate welfare and farm subsidies since my senior year of high school. (Some of these things I supported before then; that was the point I supported all of these things at once.)

On domestic social issues, I think it's basically impossible for me to get any more libertarian. At this point basically the only way I could become more libertarian on social issues is by becoming a complete non-interventionist. I've probably shifted to being slightly more interventionist since high school, but my foreign policy views have been remarkably consistent even from the time I identified as a socialist.
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Re: The Libertarian Purity Test

Postby Crimson847 » Fri Jun 10, 2016 5:32 am

I used to score in the 70s and 80s on this one. This time, I got 18.

"You are a soft-core libertarian. With effort, you may harden and become pure."

That sounds disturbingly like what Ayn Rand probably said to Nathaniel Branden in bed when he had trouble getting it up.
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"If it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them; but the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Re: The Libertarian Purity Test

Postby Matt the Czar » Fri Jun 10, 2016 5:51 am

http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/result.htm

He did a results page too.

"Here was a surprise, for me at least. Only 59.02% of test-takers favored abolishing the minimum wage. What is going on here? I've always thought of the minimum wage as one of the most widely accepted examples of "pro-worker" legislation that in fact harms the lowest-skilled workers. Is the recent, overblown empirical work of Card & Krueger gaining influence? Or have high school history teachers continued to exert their nefarious influence over the minds of their former students?"

Uh, how does the minimum wage harm workers? If he's pointing at Sweden having no minimum wage, that's because the unions decide wages.
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"Operation Prepare Your Anus is considered to have been the most thoughtfully planned and masterfully executed humanitarian intervention in American history."-DTanza, alternatehistory.com

Now as a very moral person, I would never sell a pot brownie to a toddler.
I.. I would just GIVE it to them.- CMSellers.
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Re: The Libertarian Purity Test

Postby JamishT » Fri Jun 10, 2016 6:17 am

I got a 37 so I'm in the "Your libertarian credentials are obvious. Doubtlessly you will become more extreme as time goes on" slot. I found myself agreeing largely with the first portion and nope-nope-nope-ing more as it went on.
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Re: The Libertarian Purity Test

Postby Taluun » Fri Jun 10, 2016 6:39 am

I got a 39
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Re: The Libertarian Purity Test

Postby Crimson847 » Fri Jun 10, 2016 6:40 am

Matt the Czar wrote:http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/result.htm

He did a results page too.

"Here was a surprise, for me at least. Only 59.02% of test-takers favored abolishing the minimum wage. What is going on here? I've always thought of the minimum wage as one of the most widely accepted examples of "pro-worker" legislation that in fact harms the lowest-skilled workers. Is the recent, overblown empirical work of Card & Krueger gaining influence? Or have high school history teachers continued to exert their nefarious influence over the minds of their former students?"

Uh, how does the minimum wage harm workers? If he's pointing at Sweden having no minimum wage, that's because the unions decide wages.


The fiscal conservative/libertarian argument against the minimum wage is that raising the cost of hiring a worker necessarily means that employers will hire fewer workers, thus raising unemployment. They argue that it's a simple matter of price theory, which predicts that increasing the cost of a good will reduce demand for it. How much the demand decreases depends on a good's elasticity, or how sensitive demand is to price changes--for instance, bread is much less elastic than luxury cruises.

The usual liberal counterargument is A) higher wages for people in a community also boosts demand for goods and services, which benefits businesses, B) the elasticity of demand for labor is lower than conservatives and libertarians believe, and/or C) a tradeoff of higher wages for a small increase in unemployment is worth it.
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"If it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them; but the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Re: The Libertarian Purity Test

Postby cmsellers » Fri Jun 10, 2016 7:26 am

I love this quote:

39. Should all of the public lands be privatized?

A complete puzzle to me -- only 34.07% said yes. The question appears to only favor privatizing national parks, deserts, mountains, and other government-owned land. What is so radical about that? I guess many people took this question to include government buildings and so on. Even that doesn't rule out government renting office space.


Indeed. What's so radical about privatizing the public domain? Wouldn't it make a so much more sense if Central Park were like Gramercy Park? And who needs the Everglades anyways?

And his comment about the government renting office space demonstrates one of the many things that annoy me about movement libertarians: they're willing to have the government spend more money in order to satisfy abstract principles. I mean, sure renting is more expensive than owning; but renting means the government owns less stuff, and isn't that what it's all about?
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Re: The Libertarian Purity Test

Postby Askias » Fri Jun 10, 2016 1:01 pm

12. Pretty much completely contained to freedom of expression and drugs and prostitution legalization. I am not, in fact, a libertarian.

54. Should all legislation be replaced by judge-made law, arbitration, and other private rule-suppliers?
By what stretch of the imagination is a judge a 'private rule-supplier', and why would this be a good idea? I thought libertarians were about freedom to the detriment of all else, this seems to give various parties the power to do exactly what they fault the government for doing without any mentioned additional limitations (even fewer limitations).

Aswering one question 'No' and leaving the rest blank will result in the test calling you a nazi too.
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Last edited by Askias on Fri Jun 10, 2016 1:24 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: The Libertarian Purity Test

Postby Tuli » Fri Jun 10, 2016 1:05 pm

One thing I'd like to ask these "privatize everything!" people: how well have privatized prisons worked out for America? Here is where business interests come into direct contradiction with notions of liberty and justice. I mean, minimum occupancy quotas? Shit's ridiculous. And this quiz has questions about privatizing the police, courts and law itself too. I don't get these people at all.

I got 15 points by the way, more than expected.
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Re: The Libertarian Purity Test

Postby sunglasses » Fri Jun 10, 2016 1:16 pm

I opened the test and my computer set itself on fire and then began quoting Trotsky.
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