posted 12-10-98 09:13 PM ET            

Should I switch party affiliation now?
Mostly, I think it was that abortion stuff that flunked me-- and the religious stuff too.

posted 12-10-98 09:51 PM ET            

I suspect this is why the Republicans don't do as well as they should, considering the general dividedness of the Democrats. There's still too much private agenda stuff going on this party, by way of military and religious agendas.

posted 12-10-98 09:53 PM ET            

While I oppose this, I do support other campaign finance reform they didn't ask about, and after I saw that question I lost all faith in this test to deliver an accurate reading. The questions had already been trending toward spoon-feeding right wing rhetoric. They asked it twice too. And I'll add that this would band one of the most frightfully used money in the world, the only readon I oppose it is on principle, despite stopping many outright lies spread by organizations with names like "The People's Council on Government and the Family."

posted 12-10-98 09:57 PM ET            

Anyone else notice questions 18 and 22 were asking the same thing(with almost identical wording)?

18.Would you support or oppose an amendment that bans soft money contributions, raises the aggregate contribution limits, prohibits House candidates from spending more than $50,000 in personal funds, places onerous new restrictions on issue advertising, and generally restricts the rights of citizen organizations to communicate with the public?

22.Would you support or oppose a bill to overhaul campaign finance laws? The bill is the Shays-Meehan substitute amendment adopted by the House on August 3, 1998, which bans soft money contributions, raises the aggregate contribution limits, prohibits House candidates from spending more than $50,000 in personal funds, places onerous new restrictions on issue advertising, and generally restricts the rights of citizen organizations to communicate with the public.

posted 12-10-98 10:05 PM ET            

Imran Siddiqui

posted 12-10-98 10:05 PM ET            

15 Will you send a contribution to help ACU: 1) Cover the cost of this important survey; 2) achieve our goal of distributing ACU's "HIGH CRIMES & MISDEMEANORS" Special Report to 20,000,000 Americans in the next 90 days; and 3) recruit hundreds of thousands of Americans to join ACU's effort to hold the Clinton White House fully accountable under the law for its criminal activities?

posted 12-10-98 10:09 PM ET            

http://www.self-gov.org/lp-quiz.shtml

posted 12-10-98 10:50 PM ET            

Libertarian: Also unsurprisingly, I was a "left liberal", although I was close to libetarian with a P/E of 80/30...

posted 12-11-98 12:18 AM ET            

If you don't have one, you effectively have no limit on poverty other that nature's minimum, which means that your social equality goes right out the window. You also get inefficiencies from people being paid almost nothing to do jobs that don't matter, rather than being put to more useful work (i.e if a job is not really needed, then people won't pay $7.00 per hour for it).

posted 12-11-98 04:31 AM ET            

On the Conservative I scored 56,

posted 12-11-98 07:58 AM ET            

Right on, economics cannot be isolated from the rest of society and having people working for any wage would definitely decrease the overall sense fairness, leading to increased strike/lockout-activity, not to mention that more people would be inclined to seek alternative methods of making money (crime), which would put a increased demand on the police force, which would need additional funding. But then that's not the unscupulous employers (immidiate) problem......

posted 12-11-98 09:21 AM ET            

I understood most of it but I had to look a couple of things up. Your freedom of information act really makes that easy.

posted 12-11-98 10:07 AM ET            

Guess who just scored 16 on the ridiculous Conservative quiz.

Sorry, Mike, you didn't get to keep your trophy that long.

I do agree that the wording on the quiz questions was intended to lead you to answer in ways positive for the conservatives, but I find that pathetic - do they really believe people don't see through that in this day and age?

posted 12-11-98 10:16 AM ET            

That went fast. I got the scores 40%, 10%, making me "Authoritarian" (though close to the border of "Left Liberal".

posted 12-11-98 10:18 AM ET            

The other one was more fun - 100/40

posted 12-11-98 10:30 AM ET            

I redid the 2nd quiz, and this time I got the result 60%, 10%, making me left liberal. (Some of the questions need a little more detail, to come out right, I'd say...)

posted 12-11-98 10:40 AM ET            

AUH20, Bokonon, Greg & Saras - you were all in the 80-90% range. Which of the statements were 'questionable'?

posted 12-11-98 12:58 PM ET            

As for the internet stuff, it's an unfair question, for me. I don't want it privately owned, being a socialist, rather I want the people to own it... So not so much govt. control, as much as govt. maintenance.

posted 12-12-98 03:14 AM ET            

Maybe we should design our own. Hell, I could try to put up the Right Wing Authoritarianism Test I administered last year up. (A cupee doll to the person who can tell me what that is.)

posted 12-14-98 05:04 PM ET            

I think a better name for it would have been "how REPUBLICAN are you" not "how CONSERVATIVE are you".

posted 12-14-98 06:18 PM ET            

I just took the two tests and scored a big 16 in the ACU one and 80/20 (left-liberal) in the other.

I agree with you guys that both are a little too biased (the ACU one particulary) to give good results. Anyone knows about a "good" quiz on that subject?

posted 12-14-98 08:45 PM ET            

"Do you support or oppose prohibiting amendments to reinstate...." What???? These people sure know how to make things clear.

Do not do what Johnny Don't does.

posted 12-14-98 08:50 PM ET            

http://www.from-left-field.com/test.html

posted 12-14-98 08:52 PM ET            

I've taken the libertarian quiz again (there's a link in my site). This time I got, again not surprisingly, 100 - 100 on Personal - Economic issues making me a full scale libertarian (yep, that's me).
BTW I don't think that the libertarian quiz is particularly biased (well, maybe a bit ).

Saras we got the same score on the conservative quiz and almost the same on the libertarian. I start to like Lithuania.

Should I start a libertarian faction (or at least a thread) or I will be alone???!!!!???

posted 12-14-98 11:37 PM ET            

Imran (belated reply): I'd still like to know which book, and who wrote it (suggestion: Its always a good idea to quote the author/title when using a source).

Secondly, does this take into account the very lowest skilled jobs? With no minimum wage, you get people working for basically subsistance wages, creating a poverty cycle. As can be seen in many areas around the world.

posted 12-15-98 06:09 AM ET            

On the libertarian: 80 personal, 40 economic.
Makes me a left liberal pretty close to centrist and libertarian. I can life with that; far away from conservative and authoritarian...

posted 12-15-98 12:03 PM ET            

MMYNY and MNNNN

posted 12-15-98 04:13 PM ET            

But what does "conservatism" mean w.r.t. morality and liberty? By this test a true conservative would support choice for schools but not choice for abortion. Is the message here that the government isn't responsible enough to foster public education, but it is responsible enough to dicker around with individual lives?

Sorry if ths observation turns into an abortion good or bad thing, not my intention.

What I wanted to point out is that votes on bill differ from political philosophies. For example, if I want to punish the American Tobacco companies for poisoning generations of people, does this make me a liberal? Would it not be more liberal to allow the tobacco companies to continue unfettered?

This is where the liberal-conservative things gets a little screwy, in my opinion. Consider business. In the U.S., the liberal politicians are more apt to call for government regulation and intrusion; government control is a very conservative idea. The conservatives, however, are much more into limiting the federal government's role, which is a fairly liberal objective.

Where morality is concerned, however, the tables turn. The liberals want as little government interference, whereas the conservatives actively pursue an agenda which includes prayer in public schools and prohibitions on abortion.

Gun control is an interesting issue because, as a moral issue, you think the conservatives would be the ones worried about guns' impact on "family values"-- whatever those might be. Liberals, rather than keeping the government's nose out of U.S. society's desire to be a gun society, want to enforce tight controls on ownership.

Conrast this to the issue of legalized marijuana or gay rights, and the conservative and liberal roles switch yet again.

In the U.S., the only possible compromise seems to be to allow abortion doctors who are high to proceed with said abortions using firearms but only on women who smoke.

posted 12-15-98 11:41 PM ET            

Moderate Libertarians abound. However, I am also an internationalist, which is why I didn't score too well on many Libertarian areas.

Personally, I think the Libertarian Party's political test is way too Libertarian extreme. Completely abolishing civil authority is a bit misleading for a description of "libertarian" (but, then again, it pretty much describes the American Libertarian Party, which stands pretty much for the abolision of all forms of civil authority, QUITE extreme).

posted 12-16-98 08:50 AM ET            

Arnelos: The liberals were always pacifists and internationalists. That's why liberal economic thought supports total abolition of tarrifs and trade barriers. The liberal argument is that with free trade, war is completely unprofitable and thus won't happen. As Bastiat said: "When goods don't cross borders, soldiers will."

Jojo: You're right about the US it's fairly the same in the UK). The liberal, conservative and socialist thought have been fused into the two parties and therefore you can't call the Republicans neither conservativs (though they support praying etc.) nor liberals (though they support free market). The same goes for the democrats: they are partly liberals (abortion etc.), partly conservatives (gun controls etc.) and partly social democrats (welfare state etc.).

posted 12-16-98 03:50 PM ET            

I scored a 68 on the ACU and 90 personal / 50 economic on the Libertarian. The Acu test is not a test of how conservative you are it is a test of how much you agree with the Republican Leadership in the US House.

The Libertarian test was too short and biased toward the issues that the US Libertarian party makes issues over.

A big problem with much of these tests is they evaluate on the meaning of liberal and conservative in the US now, without any of the appropriate degrees of separation.

For example, liberal can mean two different things. There are classic liberals and welfare liberals. Classic liberals wanted to restrict the government from bestowing privilages on special classes of people in order to preserve everyone's civil liberties. But, welfare liberals, to achieve the same goal of preserving liberties, want to have more government action to give benefits to the "disadvantaged." Thomas Jefferson is an example of a classic liberal, while Franklin D. Roosevelt is the arch-typical welfare liberal.

There is a similar dichotomy between classic and modern conservatives.

posted 12-17-98 04:17 PM ET            

I just consider myself pragmatic. I mean, the free market economic system is great, but I grant that some modicum of social welfare should exist. In addition, I pragmatically recognize that civil authority is a necessary part of human society and civil authority needs to tax in order to "maintain the public works" as Locke put it. American "Libertarians" *claim* to be faithful to classicial liberalism, but I find that they are anything BUT faithful to classical liberalism. Many so-called classical liberals are against internationalism and passifism and are against stable political institutions. This is not classical liberalism.

Classical Liberals believed in establishing a stable and effective government that had its central purpose as the protection of the rights of the people for one, and the advancement of the people second (lots of good Jefferson quotes for both).

"Libertarians" (big L) are faithful to neither, as they tend to be against civil authority entirely. Classical liberals were much more pragmatic. Jefferson recognized that government *must* exist in order to maintain order (an influence from Hobbes). An actual Jefferson quote is "If Men were Angels, there would be no need for government." Classical liberals were pragmatic enough to realize, as Locke pointed out, the need to establish civil authority to maintain the public works and collect revenue from the citizenry toward that end (in other words, taxes). "Libertarians" ignore this, trying to get us all to just pay "fees" on a case-by-case basis for services (ironically ignoring the fact that this would actually require *MORE* buearocracy than we already have. . .not to mention how such a system would unfairly disadvantage the poor).

posted 12-17-98 04:47 PM ET            

If anyone is still interested I scored 40 from the Conservatives and 80/30 from the other one. Just about what I thought I'd get, except I don't consider myself all that "leftish". There were just so little questions and I had a strong opinion on them according to the way they are handled in Finland.